Wine: Everyone’s Ancient Drink

Was wine an elite beverage only in the Bronze Age world of Troy? That has often been the assumption. People drank beer more often than wine, archaeologists thought. But new research published in the American Journal of Archaeology undermines that theory.

Archaeologists have long used ceramics–pots, vases, cooking vessels, jugs, etc.–to establish dates of sites. They do that based on the style of shapes, decoration, and such. But more recently, scientific expertise allows researchers to uncover what liquid the ceramic container held and thus partially absorbed as residue.

Two-handled Goblets and the Common Cup of Wine

At Troy’s royal citadel excavators dug out many two-handled red clay goblets. Trojan nobility drank from these depas goblets in circumstances that we’d identify as upper social stratum. Heat, gas chromatography and mass spectrometry applied to two gram samples from a couple of these goblets revealed wine residue. So there’s the elite wine drinking proven.

But they got the same results from common ceramic cups from the outer city where the “regular” folk lived. Apparently, Trojans grew plenty of grapes and wine was readily available. How good it might have been is anyone’s guess!

Too Much Drinking?

Everybody also consumed beer, which, by the way, had a lot of grainy bits floating in it that they might have filtered out via “straws,” as a significant nutrition source. These beverages were very low in alcohol as compared to their modern versions. We know they often mixed in water. So, don’t imagine a drunken society.

For Further Reading about Wine Residue in Cups

For more details about these intriguing new experiments on ancient drinking vessels, you may read this Smithsonian article “Who Drank Wine in Ancient Troy? Research Suggests Just About Everyone” .