Full-bodied? Oldest wine ever found yields grisly secret ingredient

The oldest wine ever to have been discovered in its original liquid form is reddish-brown and, quite conceivably, full-bodied.

- Sam Jones

It is reddish brown because of the chemical reactions that have taken place in the 2,000 years since the white wine was poured into a funeral urn in southern Spain, and potentially full-bodied because the urn also contained, among other things, the cremated bones of a Roman man.

Analysis by experts at the University of Córdoba has established that the ancient tawny liquid inside the urn found in a rare untouched Roman tomb discovered in the Andalucían town of Carmona five years ago - is a local, sherry-like wine.

Before the discovery, reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the oldest wine preserved in a liquid state was the Speyer wine bottle, which was excavated from a Roman tomb near the German city of Speyer in 1867 and dated to about AD325.

The Spanish urn was recovered in 2019 after a family having work done on their house in Carmona stumbled across a tomb on their property. "It's a sunken tomb that was excavated from the rock, which allowed it to remain standing for 2,000 years," said José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, an organic chemist at the University of Córdoba who led the analysis of the wine.