Good point.
I would expect a whole load of oxidized notes, more sherry-like than anything else I run into now.
Also, I suspect cellar management was not the greatest, so I’d expect plenty of funky yeast and Brett.
Probably plenty of home wine makers who come close. Maybe take that stuff and add local herbs, honey, even olive oil and go from there.
I wonder if we tried the wine from 2000 years ago if we would recognize its wine-ness.
We (Harrington) actually made stable no sulfite wines under the Terrane label using a product that was extracted from grape seeds and had no character of its own. We always did a regular version of the same wine with the Terrane being a single barrel. The original version of the product was more broadly sourced and imparted some extra character. Our wines are stable. I opened a '11 Nebbiolo a few months ago and it was young. No worries aging that another 20 years or so, where I’d guess it’d peak.
Plants have antioxidative and antimicrobial properties. Some strong enough to protect wine. So, surely some of the herbs and such the ancients added were to protect the wine. That may have been an acquired taste, but not necessarily bad. Speaking of acquired taste, I’m not sure how far back destemming goes, but it wasn’t a normal practice until relatively recently. Stems can impart quite a range of character: herb, spice, resin and so forth. Throwing in some locally available herbs, tree bark or whatever that did the job…why not?
Comments about ancients adding water to some wines could be both about diluting these strong flavors and the antimicrobial properties behind those strong flavors (and the wine’s stability) making the water safe.
Some additives we hear about may have been added to “bring back” a wine, the way you probably wouldn’t use a fully satisfying wine to make vermouth or nocino.
Not really the sense in which you intended the question, but my understanding is that the Venetian wines of Valpolicella were intended as substitutes for the wines of the Greek Islands, often unavailable due to war with the Ottomans, where there was at least some sort of winemaking continuity with Antiquity.