History of Wine - Prehistory and Antiquity

Prehistory and Antiquity

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 grapes of the species Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris, ancestor to modern wine grapes (V. vinifera). This would have become easier following the development of pottery vessels in the later Neolithic of the Near East, about 11,000 BCE.

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

The oldest known winery is located in the "Areni-1" cave in the Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia. Dated around 4100 BCE, the winery contains a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups. Archaeologists also found grape seeds and vines of the species V. vinifera. Commenting on the importance of the find, McGovern said, "The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BCE 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 BCE. There is also increasingly abundant evidence for winemaking in Sumer and Egypt in the third millennium BCE. The ancient Chinese made wine from native wild "mountain grapes" like V. thunbergii for a time, until they imported domesticated grape seeds from Central Asia in the second 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domestication of the grape, in the form of pips from Chalcolithic Tell Shuna in Jordan, but this evidence remains unpublished.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 a 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: the Southern Caucasus and the Near East. Wild grapes grow in Georgia, the northern Levant, coastal and southeastern Turkey, northern Iran and Armenia. None of these areas can yet be definitively singled out.