The grape is arguably the oldest cultivated product in human history and the analysis of its main product, wine, reveals clues to trade and associations in ancient times. Wine was stored in pottery vessels, which if not properly sealed with resin, wicked into clay matrices, polymerizing over time. Researchers have attempted to capitalize on these polymerized compounds by pulverizing and extracting clay sherds before applying analytical instrumentation to the identification of the wine remnants.<br/>Two main biomarkers have been employed for the identification of wine residue: tartaric and syringic acids. In order to further mine possible biomarkers for complex archaeological pieces, a metabolomics approach was applied to the analysis of modern day wine and to archaeological samples.<br/>Metabolomics, a robust methodology utilized in molecular biology and environmental toxicology, identifies the small molecules that “fingerprint” an originating chemical event. For the first time an untargeted metabolic profiling approach, using high resolution mass spectrometry and multivariate statistical analyses, was applied to wine archaeology to discover and validate novel multi-biomarker signatures of wine. The first objective was to discover a metabolic aging plateau for the chemical compositions of red and white wines, which was achieved by aging liquid samples in a laboratory at 40°C and analyzing the samples using a rapid and non-biased direct infusion mass spectrometry metabolomics approach. Upon determining that the chemical compositions stabilized by six months, a second aging experiment was conducted using model pottery sherds doped with water, white or red wine, with the aim of the analytical and statistical analyses to discover multi-biomarker signatures that indicate the presence of wine in general. Next, these biomarker signatures were translated from a metabolomics discovery platform to a high sensitivity and specificity platform. Finally, the novel multi-biomarker signature was validated by analyzing archaeological samples of known context.

Metabolomics analysis and its application to biomolecular archaeology of wine

2019 Spring National Meeting

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