Find near Seville

World’s oldest wine discovered in glass urn

This more than 2000-year-old Roman glass urn contains the oldest wine discovered to date in liquid form.

(Bild: Juan Manuel Román)

Archaeologists have made a surprising discovery in an untouched Roman mausoleum near the Spanish city of Seville. They found the oldest wine ever discovered in liquid form in an urn belonging to a wealthy man.

The urn had been recovered back in 2019 by a family in Carmona who had come across a sunken mausoleum on their property while working on their house. It was one of six urns made of limestone, sandstone, lead or glass that were found in burial niches.

One of the urns was filled with a reddish-brown liquid. As researchers from the University of Córdoba discovered, 2000 years ago the wine was probably poured over the cremated bone remains in a glass urn surrounded by a lead casing as grave goods.

The wine was poured over the bone remains in the urn as grave goods.

(Bild: Juan Manuel Román)

Despite its red color, it was white wine
Chemical analyses revealed that the wine was white despite its reddish color. The mineral salts contained in the liquid in the sherry-like wine would indicate that it was produced in Montills-Moriles - a wine-growing province in Andalusia, the scientists report.

The absence of syringic acid, which forms during the decomposition of the main pigment of red wine, clearly points to a white wine, according to the researchers. The fact that the wine found in the urn was reddish-brown in color has to do with the fact that oxidation processes - including with the bone remains - had taken place. It is thanks to the very special conditions in the mausoleum that the wine has survived to this day.

Until then, the "Roman wine" in the Historical Museum of the German Palatinate in Speyer was considered to be the oldest still liquid grape wine in the world. The "Speyer wine bottle" is dated to 325 AD and is 1700 years old - and therefore 300 years younger than the wine now found in Spain.