Ancient Wines as far back as 4.000 B.C…

Roughly speaken we should go backwards in time in the following sequence, old wines in existing wine cellars let’s suggest from Napoleonic  times, Wines from Cicero’s time in old Rome, Etruscan terracotta jars mostly broken in even more broken ships, north Cyprus, South of Turkey on the sea bottom in deep blue waters and recently discovered Middle Bronze Age city-states wine storage rooms revealing their contents of wine remains in large ceramic jars! These wine containing jars have no liquid wines left, they are invariably broken, contents evaporated but not without leaving traces…

Chemical analysis of these residues left on these jars show us organic traces of acids that are found mint, cinnamon, honey, all kind of berries and of course resins as a preservative. The recipe was similar to medicinal wines found in ancient Egypt and must have tasted like retsina or other resinous Greek and Turkish wine in our times. It makes me think of Greek Ouso and Turkish Raki, centuries old liquors on the base of anise, confirming old habits to mix wine with herbs.

Some weeks ago archaeologist have explored a biblical, old testament period Canaanite site at the Tel Kabri excavations, Canaan the by God promised land for the Jews coming from Egypt, they announced that they had found one of civilization’s oldest and largest wine cellars. This storage room held the equivalent of about 3.000 bottles of red and white wines.

This was an extremely significant discovery as it is a wine cellar unmatched in age and size. It concerns here the  remains of a palace, including a banquet hall and the wine storage rooms, destroyed 3.600 years ago in probably a violent earthquake. The wine cellar was covered in thick debris of mud, bricks and plaster, with no erect buildings on top left a perfect place to expect results.

There have been older discoveries of ancient wines but never on this scale.

Researchers have been able to re-create ancient wines and beers from the dregs of long ago tastings. What has come up recently is that also in ancient winemaking recipes were written, we found crafted wines based on recipes that were strictly followed in each and every jar.
The recognized ingredients were consistent with winemaking recipes found in ancients texts from the ruins of Mari, an early city on the borders of the Euphrates river in what is now Syria.

In the Middle Bronze Age, from 2.000 to 1.550 BC, Canaan was a confederation of city-states, the most important seems to have been Hazor, in a region that included what is today is today Israel, Lebanon, north western Jordan and parts of western Syria. At the time Canaanites were farmers, merchants and early seafarers to Cyprus and Aegean Islands these were the centuries preceding the appearance of the biblical Hebrews. In the biblical narrative, God promised Canaan as a gift to Abraham…some scholars of our modern times have been sparkling controversy suggesting that the early Israelites were in fact themselves Canaanites… so also the above mentioned ancient winemakers could have been Hebrew….