Where the First Wine Was Made

Wine making started in the Transcaucasus, now Georgia, Armenia, northern Iran, and eastern Turkey, some 8,000 years ago. The Stone Age turned out to be not so ‘stone’ after all. Archaeologists and anthropologists believe that a powerful leap in the development of civilisation occurred precisely when humans domesticated wild vines to make wine.

This required understanding where best to plant vines, how to protect them from bad weather, insects, and fungal diseases, how to cultivate the land and create tools for agriculture; a huge number of new challenges and an even greater number of new neural connections. This is how culture was born. Incidentally, Johann Gutenberg made the first printing press in 1425 based on a wine press.

Georgia. The Oldest Wine

Toasts were made in what is now Georgia long before the Roman Empire, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest known epic. This is supported by archeological discoveries in the west of the Caucasus.

In 2017, the professor of the history of wine, Patrick McGovern, discovered fragments of clay vessels at the village of Imiri in the Lower Kartli (50 km south of Tbilisi). He employed the testing of radiocarbon, and he set the date of the artefact to 8,000 years old. Acid remained on the surface in the form of tartaric, malic, succinic, and citric acids. The professor stated that this combination is characteristic exclusively of grape wine. And here are some good games that will cheer you up: Reels and Wheels XL

Armenia. The Oldest Winery

In 2010, archaeologists in a village, Areni, found a 5,500-year-old moccasin made of leather in the cave within the mountain, which was named Areni-1. After it came pieces of a prehistoric winery, a wine press, wine fermentation and storage vessels, drinking bowls, and grape pollution.

The age was found with the help of radiocarbon analysis and was 6,100 years. The entrance moccasin implied the entry mode of the winery, where the people went in barefoot and trampled grapes with their feet.

Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

The evidence is that already in the Old Kingdom, the process of fermented grape juice production was common in Egypt. In the Valley of the Kings, the oldest burial place of the pharaohs, numerous jugs for fermented wine have been found. They were sealed with resin plugs and placed in the tomb along with other items so that the deceased would not be deprived of the soul-cheering drink in the afterlife.

Of course, this wine would hardly appeal to a modern connoisseur; in Egypt and Mesopotamia, winemaking was at a very primitive stage of development. The climate of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates river basins was much more suitable for growing barley, the main ingredient of beer. Judging by archaeological finds and bas-reliefs from the Sumerian city of Uruk (however, this refers to the early history of Sumerian civilisation), wine was drunk in small quantities as a special luxury only by kings and their courtiers.

The Mediterranean, the Birthplace of Winemaking

The Mediterranean didn’t just shape culture and trade; it shaped how humans first understood wine. In Hellas, winemaking moved from instinct to intention, laying the groundwork for wine as both art and science.

‘The Science of Hellas’

Thus, even though grapes were common to practically all the continents of the planet, the classical culture of winemaking emerged only in the Mediterranean. This part of the world is the country where the oldest grape culture may be found upon the island of Crete and the islands of the Aegean Sea. It is likely to be Phoenician, having been brought into the 2nd millennium BC, and subsequently to Greece in mainland. Perhaps, grapevines were brought to North Africa by the Phoenicians, who founded Carthage around the 11 th -8 th century BC.

Thus, the existence of wine in Greece goes back to the Cretan-Mycenaean age, i.e., 3,000 years ago. However, the grape wine, once imported to Greece, was an extremely expensive and rare drink (during the Archaic, 15 th to 7 th centuries BC), consumed only at special events at lavish feasts. In everyday life, honey-based drinks were common for a long time. Evidence of this can be found in early Greek literature.