World's oldest wine discovered in Roman tomb contains human bones, researchers say

The world's oldest wine - containing submerged human remains - has been discovered at a Roman burial site in Spain.

The wine was held inside an urn for 2000 years, along with human bones belonging to a man, in what University of Cordoba researchers believe to have been part of a funeral ritual.

The tomb was originally discovered in the town of Carmona in southern Spain in 2019, and contained the remains of six people in separate urns.

Two of the urns were inscribed with names - Hispana and Senicio - but the identities of the other two men and two women are not known.

"At first, it surprised us that the liquid was preserved in the funeral urn," said Juan Manuel Román, Carmona's town archeologist.

A team from the Department of Organic Chemistry were initially unsure if the red-tinged substance was wine, and it had lost many of its characteristic components after being sealed in the tomb since the first century AD.

After studying its pH and chemical compounds present in the substance, researchers were able to identify the substance by finding polyphenols - biomarkers present in wine.

The find has replaced the Speyer wine bottle, which was discovered in a Roman tomb in Germany in 1867. Up until now, it was considered be the world's oldest wine, dating back to between 325 and 350 AD.

Researchers still cannot pinpoint the wine's origin, but they found seven specific polyphenols that were also present in wines from Montilla-Moriles, Jerez or Sanlúcar.

Roman tombs often contained possessions the dead to accompany them in their journey to the afterlife.

According to the research team, the fact the bones submerged in the wine belonged to a man was no surprise, as women were forbidden from drinking in ancient Rome.

The University of Cordoba said the discovery shed "a lot of light on the funerary rituals of ancient Rome" and offered a chance for the deceased companions to be "remembered again".

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