So ... minty wine? Herby wine? Really, really well-aged wine? What exactly would that have tasted like?

"Sweet, strong and medicinal," the Wall Street Journal says—and "certainly not your average Beaujolais." The herbaceous booze was, in fact, probably much more akin to cough syrup (or maybe to cough syrup laced with sherry) than it would be to our current, smooth-drinking concoctions. The combination of grape with honey and herbs, the researchers note, makes the Kabri wines similar in makeup to wines that were drunk, seemingly for medicinal purposes, for 2,000 years in ancient Egypt. (The Kabri wines would have been both white and red, researchers told the Journal.) And those wines, in turn, match textual descriptions of the wines of Mesopotamia.

So, wait. We have the chemical residue of the ancient wine. We know, basically, what would have been added to the grapes to make the wine more flavorful and, perhaps, medicinal. Could we recreate the wine for ourselves?

Possibly! Just before concluding this summer's excavation, the Journal notes, the archaeologists discovered two doors leading out of the wine cellar. Those may end up leading to more cellars—and, with them, to more millennia-old wine. Or, at least, more data about the millennia-old wine. And "with enough data," the researchers said, recreating the wine for ourselves could be within our reach. Bottoms up.

The Wall Street Journal via Gizmodo

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