A bottle of 2000-year-old wine has been found in an excavated and sealed bronze vessel in China's Shaanxi Province.
The bronze jug, along with a further 260 items, was unearthed from a civilian tomb collection near Shaanxi's capital Xi'an. It would appear the container dates from between the late Warring States period (475-221 BCE) and the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE), Xinhua reports.
At the time, it was common for bronze wares containing wine to be buried alongside the dead as a form of sacrifice, although it is exceptional to see wine so well preserved.
"When the bronze pot was unearthed, we found that its mouth was sealed with crude hessian, which probably prevented air entering and helped preserve the wine in it," said Xu Weihong, a researcher from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology (SPIA).
A 2000-year-old wine liquid has been unearthed in central China's Shaanxi Province.
According to Zhang Yanglizheng, an assistant researcher at SPIA, the 300ml of milky-white liquid possess alcoholic substances such hydroxyproline and glutamate. This would suggest that it possesses similar qualities and features to modern-day fermented wine.
The discovery not only reflects the level of wine making in Qin's capital Xianyang, a prefecture in modern-day Shaanxi Province, at the time, but also shows that the Qin people inherited certain rites and ceremonies from the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) period, Zhang explained.