Tutankhamen's wine
Traces of wine have been found in a 5400 B.C. amphora from the Zagros Mountains in northern Iran. But the earliest records of actual cultivation of vines for wine production are from Egyptian times, with depictions on the walls of tombs from 2600 BC.
Of course, in Egypt, wine was intended only for the upper classes. The people drank beer!
In 2005, a Spanish scientific team, sponsored by the Spanish Wine Culture Foundation, using for the first time a cutting-edge technology involving the simultaneous use of chromatography and mass spectrography, has succeeded in ascertaining that red wine was contained in a jar from Tutankhamen's tomb.
Until that moment, it was only the presence of tartaric acid that connoted the wine residue, but this cannot give any information about the coloring of the wine. Instead, with this new technique, which can also ascertain the presence of particular glycosides, one can go so far as to determine it and even have information and trace it back to the type of vineyard used, filling a gap that, for some time, has been the subject of much discussion.
Tutankhamen's wine must have been good quality, aged five years. Indeed, there is an inscription on the amphora that specifies its age, dedicates it to the "House on the West Bank" of Tutankhamen, lord of Lower Egypt, and specifies that it was produced by the chief winemaker Khaa.
