The origin of wine: The when and where

In my previous post on the origin of wine I noted the scientific consensus that the vitis vinifera that is used in the production of 99.9% of the world's wines is a domesticated version of vitis vinifera silvestris, a wild Eurasian grape that still survives today in a number of Eurasian and North African habitats.  The modern wild grape is dioecious, must be cross-pollinated by insects, and fruit is only produced by the female plant. Somewhere in our distant past, and at a specific geographic location, someone(s) took this wild grapevine into cultivation and selected for plants that were hermaphroditic (self-pollination by wind; fruit production by every flower) and bore larger, juicer, and tastier fruit with fewer seeds.  The questions to be answered are: when and where did this domestication occur?

Doctor McGovern (Ancient Wine) states that while it cannot be ruled out that Paleolithic man did not have some contact with wine -- the Paleolithic hypothesis -- humans living in that era did not have the technology or lifestyle to be credible actors in the domestication of silvestris and vinification of its juice.  He instead points to the Neolithic era as being the most likely answer to the when question.  Writing in Penn Museum's Expedition (The Beginnings of Winemaking and Vinification in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, 39(1), 1997), McGovern et al., propose the Neolithic as being the first period in our annals when all of the requisite conditions for domestication  of the wild grapevine were present simultaneously:

• Humans were living in year-round communities
• The above was brought about partly as a result of the domestication of many different plants and animals
• People living in this era had invented bread and beer, both requiring fermentation with yeast
• Pottery vessels (which would become important for the storage and transportation of wine) first appeared around 6000 BC.

A number of archaeological findings serve to cement the Neolitihic as the period within which the grapevine was domesticated and wine made and also allow us to narrow down the answer to the where question:

• Pips from vitis vinifera vinifera dating to the 6th millennium BC were found at Chokh in the Dagestan Mountains of the northeast Caucusus (McGovern et al.)
• Pips from vitis vinifera vinifera dating to between the 6th and 4th millennium BC were found at Shomutepe and Shulaveri in Transcaucasia (McGovern et al., This et al.)
• Discovery of "wine jars" dating to between 5400 and 5000 BC at Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran.

Hajji Firuz Teppe, an ancient town located in the northern Zagos Mountains of Iran, was the subject of an archaeological excavation in 1968 at which five 2.5 gallon (9 liter) jars were found imbedded in an earthen floor along a wall of a Neolithic mud brick building.  Two of these jars had a yellowish residue on the bottom which, after being subjected to infrared liquid chromatography and wet chemical analysis, proved to be a combination of calcium tartrate and terebinth tree resin.  Tartaric acid in the amounts found can only be associated with grapes and the amount of wine that would be housed in the five containers would be much more than required for a single family's use.  Clay stoppers that perfectly fit the openings at the top of the clay jars were found in close proximity to the jars and was assumed to have been used to prevent the contents from turning to vinegar.  These factors led the archaeologists to tag this site as a wine-production facility -- playfully called "Chateau" Hajji Feruz by Dr. McGovern.  As wines in Greece even today are resinated, the assumption is that resin was added to Neolithic wines either as a preservative or for medicinal purposes.

According to This et al., "Uncertainty remains about the place and period of the original domestication ... but archaeological and historical evidence suggest that premier domestication occurred in the Near East."  McGovern takes the position of the Near East as the locale and the Neolithic as the period.  Doctor Jose Vouillamez sees Transcaucasia as the consensus center of origin for botanists, archaeologists, and historians but avers that recent findings in genetics, archaeology, and linguistics point to southeast Turkey between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as the point of origin.  The genetic aspect of this claim does not seem to be supported by the Sean Myles et al., study (Genetic structure and domestication history of the grape, PNAS 2010) which only goes as far as claiming a Near East origin for vitis vinifera subspecies vinifera.

From its origins in the Near East, vinification had diffused to Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia by 3500 - 3000 BC and to Crete by 2200 BC.  From Crete it migrated to Rome and its colonies and then up the major rivers to Europe and from there to the New World.

Hello world.


© Wine -- The View From Orlando

The origin of wine: The grape story

The origin of wine is shrouded in the mists of time, legend, religion, and myth but this reality should not dissuade us from peering through the mist seeking, as we do in so many areas, answers to the question "How did it all begin?"

In his book exploring the origin of viniculture (Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origin of Viniculture, Princeton University Press, 2003), Dr. Patrick E. McGovern pointed to a number of ancient origin stories and their inability to stand up to even the most elementary scrutiny.  For example, some of the ancients held that wine had sprung from the blood of humans who had fought with the gods (and apparently lost).  In a Persian origin story, one King Jamsheed was such a lover of grapes that he had them placed in a jar (to ensure a year-round supply) and had that jar labeled "poison."  One of the harem consorts had been suffering with a terrible headache and, I guess, to end the misery, drank the liquid that had pooled in the jar.   After a long, deep sleep, she awoke, miraculously cured of her condition.  She, of course, relayed the story to the king who recognized the medicinal benefit of the brew and ordered that it be made in greater quantities for broader consumption (he had a captive customer base)

While these apocryphal tales can be easily brushed aside, the field of archaeology has provided some tantalizing clues as to the origin of wine, and it is these pointers that I will relay using, as my guide, works from Dr. McGovern (who, by the way, is the Scientific Director of the Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory for Cuisine, Fermented Beverages, and Health at the University of Pennsylvania Museum) and other leading scholars in the field.  The effort will be broken down into two phases: (i) an examination of the origin of the wine grape and (ii) an attempt to identify the geographical and temporal origins of viniculture.

According to Dr. McGovern, the modern day wine grape can probably trace its roots back to a climbing vine called Ampelopsis that lived over 500 million years ago.  Isolation -- spawned by the breakup of the super-continent Pangea, desertification, and other natural barriers -- led to today's plant family Vitaceae.  Vitaceae, according to Gyulai et al. (Morphogenetics of Ancient Vitis -- A Genotype Reconstruction), are woody climbers comprising between 13 and 17 genera (subdivisions), inclusive of Vitis, and 700 species.  The figure below shows selected elements of the Vitis taxonomy.

According to Patrice This et al. (Historical origins and genetic diversity of wine grapes, Trends in Genetics, 2006), the Vitis genus is comprised of 60 inter-fertile species, of which Vitis vinifera L is the only species used extensively in winemaking.  This species, according to This et al., first appeared approximately 65 million years ago and is the only species in the genus that is indigenous to Eurasia.  Two forms of the species still exist in Eurasia and North Africa today: V. vinifera subspecies vinifera (sativa) and V. vinifera silvestris (sylvestris).  Silvestris is the wild form of the species, according to This et al., while vinifera is its domesticated counterpart.

The wild form of V. vinifera can be found today from Portugal to Turkmenistan and from the Rhine riversides to the northern forests of Tunisia. The characteristics of the modern Eurasian wild grape are as follows: astringent; small fruit with many seeds; high acidity; tough skin; and black or dark red color.  Silvestris is also largely dioecious; that is, the male and female reproductive organs are carried on separate flowers (as opposed to hermaphroditic, where the male and female sex organs reside on the same flower thus simplifying the fertilization process).  Research has shown that primitive forms of silvestris were hermaphroditic (Dr. McGovern) and, up to today, between 2% and 3% of silvestris retain that characteristic (Dr. José Vouillamez, Anatolia -- Cradle of Wine? Wines of Turkey presentation).

The sameness of the wild grape stands in stark contrast to the diversity of subspecies vinifera (as of today, almost 10,000 clonal types exist and 99.9% of the world's wine is made from its grapes).  According to Dr. McGovern, this "... diversity is recent and the result of choosing traits that are desirable and propagating them by cuttings or routings."  What was the source of this traits?  The literature is unanimous in finding that silvestris, the wild Eurasian grape, was, at some time in the past, taken into cultivation by our forebears and domesticated.  The capability of selecting and propagating traits was, according to Dr. McGovern, unknown to humans of the Paleolithic age.


© Wine -- The View From Orlando