For wine snobs, it could be the ultimate vintage guaranteed to impress: a 9 000-year-old prehistoric preserved wine dug up from the Neolithic village of Jiahu in northern China.
The fermented Chinese ”beverage” of rice, honey and fruit was produced as early as 9 000 years ago, and offers evidence that such brews were being made in Asia at the same time that barley beer and grape wine were beginning to emerge in the Middle East.
The vintage Chinese brew was discovered by an international team of researchers including University of Pennsylvania Museum archaeochemist Patrick McGovern. The University released details of the rare haul in a statement.
”Chemical analyses of ancient organics absorbed, and preserved, in pottery jars from the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan province, Northern China, have revealed that a mixed fermented beverage of rice, honey, and fruit was being produced as early as 9 000 years ago,” it said.
Researchers also unearthed liquids over 3 000 years old, ”remarkably preserved inside tightly lidded bronze vessels,” which held specialised rice and millet ”wines.”
The more contemporary tipples hailed from the captial city of Anyang and an ”elite burial” site in the Yellow River Basin dating to 1250-1000 BC.
The findings ”provide the first direct chemical evidence for early fermented beverages in ancient Chinese culture,” according to the researchers.
Excavations from the Neolithic village of Jiahu have also revealed some of the earliest known pottery found in China.
The site is already famous for yielding some of the earliest musical instruments and domesticated rice, as well as possibly the earliest Chinese pictographic writing.
Following a series of high-tech tests — including gas and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry — a series of compounds were found in wild grape, and beeswax associated with honey, and rice.
McGovern believes the find explains the later development of the rice and millet ”wines” from the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties.
The Yellow River ”wines” had become hermetically sealed after their tightly fitting lids corroded, preventing evaporation.
It is believed they served as burial tributes to sustain the dead in the afterlife.
Researchers suspect their contents might also be related to ceremonies in which mourners communicated with the deceased and gods ”in an altered state of consciousness after imbibing a fermented beverage”. – Sapa-AFP