According to an article in the Times of Israel, wine critics have been jotting down their opinions about wine for some 3,000 years.

A clay jug that was unearthed was carved with an ancient eight-letter inscription – dating back to King Solomon’s reign in Jerusalem.

The jug was discovered in the Ophel area, near the southern wall of the Temple Mount, by a Hebrew University archaeological team. It is considered the most ancient Hebrew engraving to emerge from the archaeological digs in Jerusalem to date.

Initially, the inscription eluded researchers until Gershon Galil, a professor at the University of Haifa, interpreted it as a classification of a type of wine stored in the jug. He published his findings in the journal New Studies on Jerusalem.

As well as mentioning a date and a place of origin, the middle part of the inscription refers to the type of wine in the jug as being a cheap variety.

“This wine was not served on the table of King Solomon nor in the Temple,” Galil wrote. “Rather, it was probably used by the many forced labourers in the building projects and the soldiers that guarded them”.

The professor emphasised that the find lends support to claims of an organised bureaucratic system and provides evidence that writing was prevalent at the time.

“The ability to write and store the wine in a large vessel designated for this purpose, while noting the type of wine, the date it was received and the place it was sent from, attests to the existence of an organised administration that collected taxes, recruited labourers, brought them to Jerusalem and took care to give them food and water,” Galil said. “Scribes that could write administrative texts could also write literary and historiographic texts, and this has very important implications for the study of the Bible and understanding the history of Israel in the biblical period.”