Early history

Early history

Through an extensive gene-mapping project in 2006, Dr. McGovern and his colleagues analyzed the heritage of more than 110 modern grape cultivars, and narrowed their origin to a region in Georgia. Additionally, tartaric acid has been identified in ancient pottery jars by Patrick McGovern's team at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Records include ceramic jars from Neolithic sites at Shulaveri in present-day Georgia, (about 8000 BC), Hajji Firuz Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of present-day Iran (5400â?“5000 BC), and from Late Uruk (3500â?“3100 BC) occupation at the site of Uruk, in MesopotamiaUniversity Museum"The Origins and Ancient History of Wine". The identifications are based on the identification of tartaric acid and tartrate salts using a form of infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). These identifications are regarded with caution by some biochemists because of the risk of false positives, particularly where complex mixtures of organic materials, and degradation products, may be present. The identifications have not yet been replicated in other laboratories.

Little is actually known of the early history of wine. It is plausible that early foragers and farmers made alcoholic beverages from wild fruits, including wild grapes of the species Vitis silvestris, ancestor to modern wine grapes. This would have become easier following the development of pottery vessels in the later Neolithic of the Near East, about 9,000 years ago. However, wild grapes are small and sour, and relatively rare at archaeological sites. It is unlikely they could have been the basis of a wine industry.

In his book Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), McGovern argues that the domestication of the Eurasian wine grape and winemaking could have originated on the territory of modern day Armenia and Georgia, and spread south from there.

The oldest known winery is located in the "Areni-1" cave in the Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia. Archaeologists announced the discovery of this winery in January 2011, seven months after the world's oldest leather shoe, the Areni-1 shoe, was discovered in the same cave. The winery, which is over six thousand years old, contains a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups. Archaeologists also found grape seeds and vines of the species Vitis vinifera. Patrick McGovern commenting on the importance of the find, said, "The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BC suggests that the technology probably goes back much earlier."

Domesticated grapes were abundant in the Near East from the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, starting in 3200 BC. There is also increasingly abundant evidence for winemaking in Sumer and Egypt in the third millennium BC. The ancient Chinese made wine from native wild "mountain grapes" like Vitis thunbergii for a time, until they imported domesticated grape seeds from Central Asia in the 2nd century. Grapes were also an important food. There is slender evidence for earlier domestication of the grape, in the form of pips from Chalcolithic Tell Shuna in Jordan, but this evidence remains unpublished.

Exactly where wine was first made is still unclear. It could have been anywhere in the vast region, stretching from North Africa to Central/South Asia, where wild grapes grow. However, the first large-scale production of wine must have been in the region where grapes were first domesticated, Southern Caucasus and the Near East. Wild grapes grow in Georgia, northern Levant, coastal and southeastern Turkey, northern Iran or Armenia. None of these areas can, as yet, be definitively singled out.

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