Flavoured wine is ancient history

Fruit-flavoured wines are the latest up and coming trend in the UK following France and other the European markets where producers are trying to attract new, younger drinkers to wine. A few brands are popping up here in the UK with varieties such as Castel's Very Raspberry (£5.99 at Tesco) and Accolade Wines' Echo Falls brand with a white wine with white peach & mango and a rose with summer fruits. And a leading South African producer has been successfully exporting grapefruit flavoured wine to France.

But just how new is the concept of flavoured wine? Not new at all it would seem. Brandeis University archaeologist Andrew Koh and his team have made an exciting discovery in Tel Kabri, Israel finding 40 wine jars dating back 3,600 years to the Bronze Age. For the first time they were actually able to analyse the deposits found inside wine containers to reveal the wine was flavoured with honey, storax resin, terebinth resin, cedar oil, cyperus, juniper and possibly mint, myrtle and cinnamon. Interestingly, on one side of the room, the wine was mostly unflavoured; in the middle, it contained about half that long list of ingredients; and in a small adjoining room it contained them all. Koh and his colleagues think this wasn’t really a storage facility at all. It was a sort of kitchen, where wine was brought in from the surrounding area — the jars were made from local clay — and a brewmaster of some sort subtly flavoured them before they were served in the banquet hall next door.

Koh concluded that the particular vintage contained in the jars never made it into the banquet hall — almost certainly because an earthquake collapsed the walls, breaking the jars and spilling what was inside.