Archaeologists have unearthed details about drinking habits in ancient Israel after excavating the world's oldest known wine cellar in Upper Galilee.
Discovered last summer, the room has mud-brick walls that appear to have suddenly collapsed, preserving around 40 wine jars left inside for thousands of years, Live Science reported.
The researchers, who have published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE, found through chemical analyses that herbs such as mint, cinnamon and juniper were often mixed into the wine.
The ancient cellar was part of a "palatial" compound in modern northern Israel, close to the borders of Syria and Lebanon. It was constructed right next to the complex's banquet hall.
"What we have is quite substantial--40 jars--but it's not enough to redistribute to the whole countryside, so we're arguing that this is the personal or palatial wine cellar," researcher Andrew Koh, an archaeologist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., told Live Science.
"It's for a nuclear kind of in-group, whether it's the family or clan, and it's for local, on-the-spot consumption. But it's still a lot of wine--they must have thrown large parties."
Koh and his colleagues were excavating an area on the site when a 3-foot-tall wine jar turned up, leading to the cellar with 39 more jars; altogether, the wine vessels would have held 528 gallons of liquid.
The study examined 32 of the jars, all of which held tartaric acid, a main acid found in wine. Nearly all of the jars that were studied also contained syringic acid, which indicates red wine. Pine resin and cedar were also present in the ancient samples; the former was probably added as a preservation technique, while the latter may have come from the beams used to press grapes into wine.
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