The roots of Balsamic vinegar can be traced back to the cooking of grape must. A funerary painting found in Egypt shows that this practice for producing the first sweetener used in the Mediterranean area dates back a long time, at least to 1000 BC. The Roman era was also a period of great development for cooked must, so much so that there was a specific verb for the activity of cooking must: “defrutare.” The agronomist Lucius Columella, in his description of the ideal farm in the 1st century AD, even included a specific room for this process. Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC), in the first book of the Georgics, describes a country house in his hometown of Mantua, which was part of the Emilia area in Roman times: “It is autumn... the woman sits at the loom weaving and singing, or she cooks the must, the sweet juice, over the fire, carefully skimming the foam from the bubbling liquid in the pot with a branch.” Lucius Columella also wrote in his De Rustica: “This cooked must, once cooled, is transferred and stored in barrels so it can be consumed after a year.”