Dr Dimitri Van Limbergen and Dr Paulina Komar

Fresh clues to Roman winemaking were recently unlocked by Dr Dimitri Van Limbergen, of the Department of Archaeology at Ghent University, and Dr Paulina Komar, of the Faculty of History at the University of Warsaw, who explored archaeological and literary evidence surrounding ‘dolia’ earthenware vessels – aided by comparisons to qvevri in modern-day Georgia

‘On a trip to Georgia, I became fascinated with buried vessels making dry, fantastic amber wines. I met Paulina at a conference and mentioned comparing these modern Georgian wines to Roman wines, and she said, “I’ve been thinking about this as well”.

‘For a long time, the opinion on Roman wine was that it was badly made. This was mostly because there wasn’t much attention on what dolia really did to a wine. We looked instead at these vessels from a perspective of, “Maybe they were able to make fairly decent wines with [them].”

‘Roman winemakers weren’t able to detect certain chemical things that developed in wine. However, they knew when fermentation was going in a good or bad direction, and how to avoid certain wine flaws. They buried dolia in the ground, and used different shapes depending on geographic area. When the Romans started using these vessels, they were already millennia old. So, there was a lot of practical experience.

‘Most dolia were around 500 to 2,000 litres, but you have specimens of 2,000 to 3,000 litres. Especially in southern France from [around] the first century CE, you see very big estates popping up with hundreds of dolia.

‘We know the Roman elite drank certain wines. There’s an anecdote about a grandfather of Mark Antony who was persecuted for political reasons and hid at his friend’s house. Unfortunately, the friend’s servant went to buy a better type of wine than he usually would… and the grandfather was found and killed.

‘More people probably got access to decent-quality wines in the early Roman empire, but particular classes, such as soldiers or slaves, were mostly drinking

“wines” made from leftovers from pressings with added water or spices – which also provided needed calories.

‘Herbs were probably added to hide the bad taste of [some] wine, but some things were added to improve good wine. The aristocracy drank mulsum – wine mixed with honey. They also added pepper – an exotic spice that wasn’t available to everyone.

‘Something to [also] take into account is that wine colour was a much fuzzier, wider spectrum in antiquity than we’re used to today.

‘[In terms of what is next] Paulina has applied for a European Research Council starting grant to recreate dolia and do analysis on what chemical compounds we can detect in residues of ancient wines. This will tell us more about how they probably tasted. We need much more bioarchaeological evidence.’