Wine that is said to be the oldest in the world has been discovered in Spain. It was unearthed in the city of Carmona, in the province of Seville, Andalusia. When residents of a home in Carmona began digging with an excavator to build a pool in the courtyard of their home in 2019, they unearthed an ancient Roman crypt, estimated to be from the first half of the 1st century AD. As you can see in photo 1, one of the 6 cremation urns in the crypt was filled with a red liquid and contained the bones of a cremated man with a golden ring. When the municipal authorities released the outcomes of this discovery to the public in the following year, 2020, they announced that the liquid was not wine but might be a water-soluble aromatic essence, but they conducted further detailed analysis and this year ascertained that it is actually wine. Photo 2 shows the urn in a lead container.


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What they focused on in the analysis of this liquid was polyphenols, being biomarkers of wine, and when they compared it with Andalusian wines such as sherry, Sanlúcar, and Montilla, they found that 7 types of polyphenols matched. However, it did not contain the syringic acid characteristic of red wine, which enabled its identification as a white wine. As for the color, they speculated that the wine may have turned red due to the presence of ash and the oxidation of the wine itself. They suggested Montilla wine or sherry, famous white wines of the region, as possible identities of the wine.

Speaking of sherry, Magellan, who became the first person in human history to circumnavigate the globe, loaded 253 barrels and 417 wineskins of wine in the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the port of departure across the oceans for his great voyage, and that wine was sherry. The type of sherry that first circumnavigated the world 500 years ago is not specified in the historical records, but they surmise that it was an amontillado, a wine that can withstand long-term storage and is physically oxidized and aged by exposure to oxygen after going through biological maturation with yeast. Photo 3 shows 5 sherries in a tasting set that I tried when I did a tour at the sherry maker Osborne. One of the most popular types of sherry, one drunk as an aperitif, is the dry Fino type, on the far left. The aperitif served at the feast held on October 22, 2019 to celebrate the enthronement of His Majesty the Emperor was a high-quality medium-dry Fino sherry made by Sandeman, as shown in photo 4.


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By the way, they say the oldest existing sake in Japan is one that had been stored unopened since the brewery, Osawa Sake Brewery in Saku, Nagano Prefecture, was founded, in the 2nd year of Genroku (1689). In 1969, the sake was opened during filming for a TV program and Kinichiro Sakaguchi, “the Sake Professor,” tasted it, commenting, "The aroma is exactly like a 100-year-old sherry I once came across in Spain." I guess the sherry he tasted in Spain might have been a well-aged amontillado. Isn’t it mysterious that a grape wine and a sake, two kinds of wine with different ingredients and manufacturing methods, grew more like each other with the addition of time?

Now when it comes to this famous Andalusian wine, a descendant of a 2,000-year-old ancient Roman wine discovered in liquid form, which spread across the world as a companion on great adventures circumnavigating the globe during the Age of Discovery, and has even made an appearance at the feast for the Japanese Imperial family, being a drinker, I intend to adopt a more serious attitude to it from now on. At least for the first glass.