Aged wine

The rich history of wine has gotten richer with the discovery of the first grape fossils in the western hemisphere.

Scientists from The Field Museum in Chicago, USA found grape seeds belonging to nine new species of the fruit in Colombia, Panama and Peru that date back 19 million to 60 million years ago, Fox News reports.

The oldest of the seeds gave rise to commercial grapes used for making wine, said Dr. Monica Carvalho, an assistant curator at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology and co-author of the study on the discovery, according to Fox News.

Meanwhile, the oldest wine was the contents of a bottle found in 1867. The still unopened bottle discovered in Speyer, Germany has been dated between 325 and 350 AD which meant it was 1,700 years old, CNN reports.

In 2019, another old wine was found in the southern Spanish town of Carmona. Scientists from the University of Cordoba released a study confirming that it is the oldest liquid wine at 2,000 years old. The study was pubished last month.

Both wines were found in Roman tombs. The bottled one was with nine others that were broken and inside the sarcophagus of a man. The tomb’s other sarcophagus containing a woman’s remains also had six bottles of wine, all broken.

Meanwhile, the Spanish wine was found by workers renovating a home. It was inside an urn containing cremated remains and burned ivory thought to come from a funeral pyre, study lead author José Rafael Ruiz Arrebola, a professor of organic chemistry at the university, said, according to CNN.

The urn had around 4.5 liters of reddish liquid that used to be white wine.