Uncanny Archaeology of Halloween

Fine Wine & a ****-Poor Vintage
Volume 53 Number 6, November/December 2000
by Spencer P.M. Harrington

Two corked seventeenth-century wine bottles, one found on a wreck off the coast of the Netherlands, the other in the foundation of a demolished house in England, have yielded strikingly different contents: a rare example of 350-year-old Portuguese wine, and a putrid concoction of urine and hair designed to harm witches who cast spells.

The wine, possibly the private stash of a naval officer, was recovered from a Dutch warship sunk in the Wadden Sea, a shallow sound between the North Sea and the Netherlands coast. The onion-shaped green bottle is among the oldest corked bottles ever found with its wine intact.

The wreck was investigated by the Netherlands Institute for Ship and underwater Archaeology (NISA), a government-sponsored team that since the late 1980s has been conducting surveys of the Wadden Sea to inventory the more than 500 vessels, mainly Dutch, that are thought to have sunk there. "The Wadden Sea was an enormous anchorage between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries," says Arent Vos, head of NISA's Archaeological Diving Unit.