2,000-year-old funerary urn found in Spain contains the world's oldest known liquid wine

Archaeologists in Spain have discovered the world's oldest known liquid wine in an unexpected place: mixed with ashes inside a Roman-era funerary urn, a new study finds. 

The wine, which the scientists described as "reddish liquid" in appearance, was found in a roughly 2,000-year-old tomb during a house construction project in Carmona, a town in Seville, in 2019.

The use of wine in Roman-era burial rituals is well documented, but discovering a wine sample this old, in its liquid state, was "rather exceptional and unexpected," the scientists wrote in their paper, published June 16 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 

"It's a sunken tomb that was excavated from the rock, which allowed it to remain standing for 2,000 years," José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, an organic chemist at the University of Córdoba and a senior author of the study, told The Guardian. 

Wine contains distinct chemical compounds that reflect not only its flavor and appearance but also its origins. But after many years, these chemicals often undergo substantial decay that makes them difficult to characterize, the scientists wrote in the paper. 

During the funerary ritual, cremated ashes were mixed with the liquid, making it murky, the scientists told The Guardian. 

Using analytical techniques including high-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry, the scientists sifted through element-by-element to find components that belonged to the liquid.