🕵️‍♂️ 🍷 The Great Roman Wine Scam? UCD School of Classics Assistant Professor Conor Trainor's archaeological investigations of ancient wineries at Knossos suggest that Cretan wine producers were deceiving their Roman-era customers with a knock-off wine supplemented with honey. 🐝 "Pliny the Elder described one shortcut for making raisin wine – boiling grape juice in large pots. However, the mixing basins found at Knossos show no evidence of heating. This suggests another possibility: adding honey to wine before packaging. The beehives, excavated from Roman-era pottery kilns and identifiable by their rough interior surfaces designed for honeycomb attachment, hint at a connection between winemaking and honey. Similar discoveries at other Greek sites suggest that honey and wine may have been mixed before shipping." 🥴 ...but did the Romans mind? "The vast quantities of Cretan wine imported into Rome suggest that buyers weren’t too concerned either way. Based on the sheer volume of now-empty wine amphoras from Crete that have been found in archaeological sites in Rome, I suspect that the populous of Rome likely cared less about authenticity than we do today."