I belive that ancient wine has been found, in amphora bottles from ancient greek times-these were found in a bronze-Age shipwreck. However, ahve any sealed bottles of wine ever been found in a tomb? Were the contents still recognizable was wine?
The Egyptians made and drank wine-was it anything like the wines we make today?
I haven’t heard of any cases of liquid wine being found as a grave good. Egyptian tombs are the most likely place to find these but all the food and drink I know of from those were dried before or after burial. The ceramics used for most wine storage Back In The Day were somewhat porous at a microscopic level, and water evaporated from them steadily, if very slowly (on the order of centuries). There was a story a few years back of the discovery of some buried glass bottles of 17th century sherry (or maybe madeira?) that was still drinkable. Not in a tomb, though.
Not certain about Egyptian wine specifically, but elsewhere in Mediterranean Antiquity wine was generally by our standards sweet, high-alcohol, thick (almost syrupy), and full of sediment. Water was generally added before drinking, in various proportions depending on the context of consumption. There was however an enormous amount of regional and cultural variation; the range and variety of wines available to a well-to-do Roman during the late Republic and early Empire, for example, approached that of most first-worlders today. The Egyptians would have had fewer options until the later centuries BC.
According to the Winepro’s page, the oldest known (liquid) wine was found in Speyer, Germany in an amphora dating back to around 325 AD. The amphora was found inside a stone sarcophagus, so there you have it.
Huh, hadn’t heard of that one. The glass bottle and the floating oil seal must have done the trick. Neato.