New archaeochemical insights into Roman wine from Baetica

Abstract

Although ancient wines adsorbed on vessel walls or their remains can be identified with the help of specific biomarkers, no analysis of such wines in the liquid state appears to have been reported to date. Therefore, the 2019 finding in a Roman mausoleum in Carmona, southern Spain, of an ash urn roughly 2000 years old, containing a reddish liquid, was rather exceptional and unexpected. An archaeochemical study of the liquid allowed it to be deemed the oldest ancient wine conserved in the liquid state. The study used inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) to determine the chemical elements in the mineral salts of the wine, and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) to identify the polyphenols it contained. The mineral salt profile and, especially, the detection and quantification of some typical polyphenols, allowed the liquid to be identified as white wine.