Your cute, innocent faced baby girl had to have been put up to this – could she have really thought this one up all by herself? Your baby just whizzed into the kitchen, planted herself directly in front of you and blurted out “momma, where did wine come from”! Of all the questions you expected to hear from your child, this is not one of them. So, with a sweet smile you tell her you are going to have to get back with her on that tomorrow since you are now engaged in cooking dinner. You have to scramble after she goes to bed to look online since you have absolutely no idea where wine did come from.
Stone Age Wine Lovers
As far as most of us know wine is one of those things that simply sprouted fully developed. But according to one archaeologist there is a starting point for wine’s relationship with man, the Neolithic period also known as the late Stone Age. Wine connoisseurs who swirl, sniff and daintily taste their wine must find it extremely distressing to think of our ancestors swigging from an animal skin pouch full of fermented berries with a stone axe slung over their shoulder. Not exactly a refined start for what now is considered an art form all its own, the art of wine making.
Fermented Berries
Patrick McGovern, (wine archaeologist extraordinaire) theorizes that our highly alert progenitors watched as birds ate fermenting berries off trees and bushes and got buzzed or drunk. Curious, our ancestors likely tried the fermented berries for themselves and found the effect to be pleasant and thus the advent of wine tasting.
Our wine archaeologist uses molecular analysis, chemical analysis and archaeology to study the history of wine. There is a growing field of bio-molecular archaeology that is proving useful in studying and tracing the origins and spread of life around the planet. From the University of Pennsylvania where he is based, Patrick McGovern studies ancient organics and it is through his studies that the origin of wine has been placed at about 8,500-4,000 BC or the late Stone Age. He cannot prove who made the first wine, but he is attempting to prove where the first grapevines were domesticated.
Wild Vines
McGovern and his team have visited Turkey to collect wild grape samples to compare to modern grape cultivars. In Turkey there are rugged regions where there exist grapevines that have never been cultivated and have always been wild. They have recovered pottery from the first century BC with traces of organic material, hopefully produced from the wild vines. It is hoped that DNA will tie the wine in the pottery to the vines to proving that these vines have existed at least that long. Once a population of vines is successfully tied to a particular DNA strain, the scientists can match vine DNA to other plant populations and relics.
When baby girl gets up tomorrow, tell her wine originally came from a curious Stone Age ancestor!
