Wine Cellar -- 3,700 years old, Is Revealed In Israel

Aged to perfection? 3,700-year-old cellar housed 'luxurious' wine

A 3,700-year-old palatial cellar packed with jars once filled with a wine-like brew has been discovered at an archaeological site in northern Israel, a team of researchers announced Friday.

The cellar is perhaps the oldest of its type ever discovered and the wine was anything but ordinary. Spiked with juniper berries, cedar oil, honey and tree resins, it was likely the good stuff pulled from the cellar for grand, royal banquets where resident rulers and perhaps their trading partners washed down a feast of wild cattle with an intoxicating swill, according to Assaf Yasur-Landau, chair of the maritime relations department at the University of Haifa in Israel.

"This wine included, it is important to note, not only local materials but also possibly materials that were imported from elsewhere such as cedar oil, thus making it a very luxurious drink that was reserved for these special occasions," he said during a telephone briefing with reporters on Thursday.

The archaeologists who have been exploring the Canaanite site, known as Tel Kabri, announced on Friday that they had found one of civilization’s oldest and largest wine cellars. The storage room held the equivalent of about 3,000 bottles of red and white wines, they said — and they suspected that this was not the palace’s only wine cellar.

The new finds at Karbi represent a later stage in the development of winemaking in Canaan. "It also lines up nicely with the huge contemporaneous or later 'wine cellars' and storerooms" at ancient sites in central Turkey, Syria and elsewhere in northern Mesopotamia.

reply to post by snarky412


I hope some of the wine magazines get onto this story and cover it well with extensive interviews and timelines, etc. The interest in wine seems to have grown lately (correct me if I'm wrong, that's my perception), so this is a natural for in-depth historical research and enhanced understanding of the era.

Cinnamon bark, mint, juniper berry, tree resin, honey, cedar oil, and acids consistent with wine. This sounds like it would taste awful. Now someone has to make some of this and tell us what it's like.

Great story. Amazing they have been preserved so well. Thanks for sharing.

An interesting article and an interesting way to take a look at history.

SnF


And. . . . . since I can't help myself. . . . .

Dianec
Cinnamon bark, mint, juniper berry, tree resin, honey, cedar oil, and acids consistent with wine. This sounds like it would taste awful. Now someone has to make some of this and tell us what it's like.

Great story. Amazing they have been preserved so well. Thanks for sharing.

Just found this article and it states that they found 2 doors that lead out of the cellar but the archaeologists won't be able to start back digging until 2015, their season is over for now.....it would drive me crazy to wait that long after we had just discovered these findings. Unless it's a misprint and they meant '2014'

More discoveries may be in the offing. Just days before the archaeologists wrapped up this summer’s work, they came upon two doors leading out of the wine cellar where they had been digging, one to the south, and one to the west. They will have to wait until the next excavation season, in 2015, to find out if the doors lead to additional storage rooms, possibly with more wine that the Canaanite connoisseurs of the grape never got to swoon over at their goat-meat banquets.

Wine Cellar, Well Aged, Is Revealed In Israel

Aleister
reply to post by snarky412

 

I hope some of the wine magazines get onto this story and cover it well with extensive interviews and timelines, etc. The interest in wine seems to have grown lately (correct me if I'm wrong, that's my perception), so this is a natural for in-depth historical research and enhanced understanding of the era.

I would hope so too.
Being as they have left 'recipes', which over time has been passed along & modified, which in turn has probably helped the wine makers of today on the so-called do's & don't ......what works and what doesn't

“They wrote about the recipes,” Dr. Cline said, referring to the Mari texts. “Here, for the first time, we believed, we have these crafted wines that verified the recipes beyond shadow of doubt.”

Dr. McGovern and other researchers have been able to re-create ancient wines and beers from the dregs from long-ago tastings. Dr. Koh said his group expected to produce a reasonable facsimile of the 1700 B.C. vintage favored by the palace elite in the land of Canaan.

reply to post by snarky412


Call me nuts, or an alcoholic, but I'd try it.. If there was ANY wine in those bottles I'd give it a taste. Heck, how could you pass up the opportunity...

The article made it look like there was some actual wine... twice, one in the title by saying "aged well" and then later with this:

Digging this summer at the ruins of a 1700 B.C. Canaanite palace in northern Israel, archaeologists struck wine.

What a bore, it then goes to say:

The vessels were broken, their liquid contents long since vanished

Trying to make it look more exiting than it is, meh, i wish they've found old 3000 year old bottle with actual wine, that would be historical.

Now this is, to be honest and down to earth, "We found some traces of jars that used to contain wine, and there are some traces of that wine on the dirt around the jars"

That's a world away from "we found 20 bottles of 3000 year old wine, wanna taste?"

Even if they produce some wine today with that recipe, it will never taste the same, who knows if they will get it right, even with modern technics and labs, it has been proven almost imposible to reproduce modern drinks (pepsi vs coke) for example.

jhn7537
reply to post by snarky412

 

Call me nuts, or an alcoholic, but I'd try it.. If there was ANY wine in those bottles I'd give it a taste. Heck, how could you pass up the opportunity...

Lol i would too, imagine that, have some 500,000 dollars to spare? here let me get you one glass of this 3500 year old wine, how's that? what did you say, bring the bottle? sure Sr, here's your bill, it will be just 10 million dollars!

Dianec
Cinnamon bark, mint, juniper berry, tree resin, honey, cedar oil, and acids consistent with wine. This sounds like it would taste awful. Now someone has to make some of this and tell us what it's like.

Great story. Amazing they have been preserved so well. Thanks for sharing.

add some peppercorns and make some mulled wine.

i use most of that stuff, for mine.

resin is is for retsina, which i love. very cold.

juniper would make me puke, lol! it would taste like gin.

i don't think it's all in one wine.

Dianec
Cinnamon bark, mint, juniper berry, tree resin, honey, cedar oil, and acids consistent with wine. This sounds like it would taste awful. Now someone has to make some of this and tell us what it's like.

Great story. Amazing they have been preserved so well. Thanks for sharing.

haha.. well I don't think they were making Cabernet Sauvignon.. more of a mead or a spiced wine. And they all taste like plonk.

Much like beer of the olden days was more or less mouldy water with a mild fizz... the wines would not be what we consider wine today.

Also, even if someone were to get the exact ingredients and brew a batch of this, it would be entirely different. The yeast is what makes most of these things unique. I remember when they found a sunken wreck with bottles of alcohol in the hull, and they still contained yeast. near 200 year old yeast, from which they could replicate the product in the bottles... or close to, as there would be no way to know what it originally tasted like.

It would still probably taste like old feet and underpants, but back in those days, eat, drink and be merry was all about over indulgence.

reply to post by Kaifan


"Waiter, this wine tastes like vinegar!"

"indeed sir. It is 3500 years old."

oO

Ceder oil is still used today to
control parasites on farm animals.
Honey as an antibacterial agent.
Ingredients for pestilence control,
or a wash prep for the dead.

. . . would you still drink it ?

____________________________

ToneDeaf

Ceder oil is still used today to
control parasites on farm animals.
Honey as an antibacterial agent.
Ingredients for pestilence control,
or a wash prep for the dead.

. . . would you still drink it ?

____________________________

probably used for the barrels.

that's how retsina came into being.

pine resin was used to seal goat skins.

thankfully, cedar oil faded out of our gastronomic menu.