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China was drinking wine 9,000 years ago

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
07/12/2004  Telegraph (London)
A mixed fermented wine of rice, honey and fruit was being drunk in northern China 9,000 years ago, more than a thousand years before the previously oldest known fermented drinks, brewed in the Middle East.

In the past scientists relied on the stylistic similarities of early pottery and bronze vessels to argue for the existence of a prehistoric fermented beverage in China. 

Today's findings provide the first direct chemical evidence from ancient China for such beverages, which were of cultural, religious, and medical significance.

Dr Patrick McGovern, of the Applied Science Centre for Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania Museum, and colleagues in America and China focused on finds in the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in Henan Province.

The team found and analysed chemical traces left by the fermented drinks on pottery shards.

Through a variety of chemical methods, certain compounds were identified, including those for hawthorn fruit, wild grape, beeswax associated with honey and rice.

Dr McGovern, an archaeochemist, said: "As far as what the early Neolithic might have tasted like, I think that the fruit, whether grape and/or hawthorn fruit would have predominated."

Liquids more than 3,000 years old, remarkably preserved inside bronze vessels, were also analysed. The vessels were hermetically sealed when their lids corroded.

These vessels, from the capital city of Anyang and an elite burial in the Changzikou Tomb in Yellow River Basin, were found to contain rice and millet "wines".

The beverages were flavoured with herbs, flowers and tree resins, and are similar to herbal wines described in Shang dynasty oracle inscriptions, the team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
 

hawthorn = боярышник
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