Wine related articles
White wine was Tutankhamen's afterlife tipple
Paris - King Tutankhamen, the teenage king of ancient Egypt, headed into
the afterlife with the help of a rather decent white wine, the British
weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday's issue.
University of Barcelona researchers in Spain used liquid chromatography
and mass spectrometry to get the chemical "fingerprint" of residues
found in six wine jars found in Tut's tomb.
All six contained tartaric acid, which is characteristic of grapes, but
only one contained syringic acid, which is only found in the skin of red
grapes and gives red wine its colour.
Their conclusion is that the other five jars must have contained white
wine - a surprise, given that until now the first evidence of white wine
in Egypt dated from the third century AD, about 1 500 years after the
young pharaoh died.
Red wine was often placed in tombs in ancient Egypt to give the dead a
jolly send-off into the afterlife, but it now seems that white wine was
on the menu as well.
"It must have been considered a very good drink," lead researcher Rosa
Lamuela-Raventos told the British weekly.
Wine makers today can remove red grape skins to create white wine, but
it is most unlikely that their counterparts in ancient Egypt knew how to
do this, which suggests that white grapes were probably grown in
Tutankhamen's time.
The research is to be published in the Journal of Archaeological
Science. - Sapa-AFP
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