At the Ideal Wine Company we concentrate on
providing you with the types of luxury wine you are proud to store in your
collection. Wine collecting is hardly a modern practice; it goes back
centuries. It goes back to the ancients, to the days of mythology. For those of
us in the wine trade, the history of the wine making industry is fascinating;
you can use it to chart the history of society, of the human race itself. In
this way wine acts as so much more than a drink; it’s a link to our past, our
ancestors. That’s why we’re excited by the discovery of what is potentially the
world’s oldest wine cellar.
The Mirror Newspaper reported last Saturday (23rd
November) that experts had discovered a wine cellar that is around 4,000 years
old in Israel. Tel Kabri, Israel plays host to the fantastic discovery which
had 40 amphorae like jars each containing 50 litres of strong sweet wine and the cellar dates back
to around 1,700 BC. It was believed to have been produced by the ancient
Canaanites, the people who were known to have inhabited Palestine before the
Jewish peoples of the Old Testament.
It’s an amazing discovery and it can tell us
much about the ancient art of wine making. Already we know that the jars
contain wine flavoured with cinnamon, mint, honey and psychotropic resins and
this tells us a lot about the culture of the time, however archaeologists were
also surprised to discover that the cellar discovered in the ruins of Tel Kabri
is not in fact that much different from cellar’s in Israel’s modern day wineries;
it suggests a strong tradition that has remained undented by the ravages of
time.
In the
article Professor Eric Cline, chair of the Department of Classical and Near
Eastern Languages and Civilisations at George Washington University, who was
involved in the excavation and research on the site, said that researchers have
already excavated a three foot long jug they have nicknamed ‘Bessie.’ In
further comments he said that “we dug and dug, and all of a sudden, Bessie’s
friends started appearing-five, 10, 15, ultimately 40 jars packed in a
15-by-25-foot storage room.” He concluded by saying that “this is a hugely
significant discovery - it’s a wine cellar that, to our knowledge, is largely
unmatched in age and size.”
For those of us with an interest in wine,
like all of you out there, there is so much that this discovery can tell us. We
have already discovered the types of ingredients people were using this early
and how their wines tasted. We still have to find out their methods and this
discovery should yield some fascinating findings yet. What it does already tell
us is that wine collecting is a time honoured tradition and it is so much more
than a hobby; it’s a cultural link back to our roots as a species and it should
be celebrated as such.
