Essentially this is supportive
evidence for the antiquity of complex process of domesticated wine making. Agriculture itself began itself around ten
thousand years ago and was established at the village level before the Bronze
Age economy emerged. Thus wine making likely
emerged just as early as we are then addressing any convenient fruit to produce
alcohol in a jug.
As the metal trade evolved, the superiority
of the grape would quickly dominate the trade itself. Today we forget that in living memory,
farmers gathered surplus fruit in season to produce their own alcoholic brew
for their own private consumption and little of this was ever fit for
sate. I suspect that that tradition was
in place with the firsts grain growing and beer making.
This cave is something else. It is a local endeavor that produces a great
quantity of plausibly quite good wine that could well have been used as an
export product for the community. We can
be sure it was.
Earliest Known Winery Found in Armenian Cave
Barefoot winemakers likely worked in cave where oldest leather shoe was
found.
An apparent wine press (in front of sign) and fermentation vat (right)
emerge during a dig in Armenia
Photograph courtesy Gregory Areshian
James Owen for National
Geographic News
Published January 10, 2011
As if making the oldest
known leather shoe wasn't enough, a prehistoric people in what's
now Armenia
Undertaken at a burial site, their winemaking may have been dedicated
to the dead—and it likely required the removal of any fancy footwear.
Near the village of Areni, in the same cave where a stunningly
preserved, 5,500-year-old leather moccasin was recently found, archaeologists
have unearthed a wine press for stomping grapes, fermentation and storage
vessels, drinking cups, and withered grape vines, skins, and seeds, the study says.
"This is the earliest, most reliable evidence of wine
production," said archaeologist Gregory
Areshian of the University of
California , Los Angeles
"For the first time, we have a complete archaeological picture of
wine production dating back 6,100 years," he said. (Related: "First
Wine? Archaeologist Traces Drink to Stone Age.")
The prehistoric winemaking equipment was first detected in 2007, when
excavations co-directed by Areshian and Armenian archaeologist Boris Gasparyan
began at the Areni-1 cave complex.
In September 2010 archaeologists completed excavations of a large, 2-foot-deep
(60-centimeter-deep) vat buried next to a shallow, 3.5-foot-long (1-meter-long)
basin made of hard-packed clay with elevated edges.
The installation suggests the Copper Age vintners pressed their wine
the old-fashioned way, using their feet, Areshian said.
Juice from the trampled grapes drained into the vat, where it was left
to ferment, he explained.
The wine was then stored in jars—the cool, dry conditions of the cave
would have made a perfect wine cellar, according to Areshian, who co-authored the
new study, published Tuesday in the Journal
of Archaeological Science.
Wine Traces
To test whether the vat and jars in the Armenian cave had held wine,
the team chemically analyzed pottery shards—which had been radiocarbon-dated to
between 4100 B.C. and 4000 B.C.—for telltale residues.
The chemical tests revealed traces of malvidin, the plant pigment
largely responsible for red wine's color.
"Malvidin is the best chemical indicator of the presence of wine
we know of so far," Areshian said.
Ancient-wine expert Patrick E.
McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University
of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia
One thing that would make the claim a bit stronger, though, said
McGovern, who wasn't involved in the study, is the presence of tartaric acid,
another chemical indicator of grapes. Malvidin, he said, might have come from
other local fruits, such as pomegranates.
Combined with the malvidin and radiocarbon evidence, traces of tartaric
acid "would then substantiate that the facility is the earliest yet
found," he said.
"Later, we know that small treading vats for stomping out the
grapes and running the juice into underground jars are used all over the Near
East and throughout the Mediterranean," he added.
Winery Discovery Backed Up by DNA?
McGovern called the discovery "important and unique, because it
indicates large-scale wine production, which would imply, I think, that the
grape had already been domesticated."
As domesticated vines yield much more fruit than wild varieties, larger
facilities would have been needed to process the grapes.
McGovern has uncovered chemical and archaeological evidence of wine,
but not of a winery, in northern Iran
But the apparent discovery that winemaking using domesticated
grapevines emerged in what's now Armenia Armenia ,
Georgia
McGovern—whose book Uncorking the Past: The
Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages traces the origins
of wine—said the Areni grape perhaps produced a taste similar to that of
ancient Georgian varieties that appear to be ancestors of the Pinot Noir grape,
which results in a dry red.
To preserve the wine, however, tree resin would probably have been
added, he speculated, so the end result may actually have been more like a
Greek retsina, which is still made with tree resin.
In studying ancient alcohol, he added, "our chemical analyses have
shown tree resin in many wine samples."
Ancient Drinking Rituals
While the identities of the ancient, moccasin-clad wine quaffers remain
a mystery, their drinking culture likely involved ceremonies in honor of the
dead, UCLA's Areshian believes.
"Twenty burials have been identified around the wine-pressing
installation. There was a cemetery, and the wine production in the cave was
related to this ritualistic aspect," Areshian speculated.
Significantly, drinking cups have been found inside and around the
graves.
McGovern, the ancient-wine expert, said later examples of ancient
alcohol-related funerary rituals have been found throughout the world.
In ancient Egypt ,
for example, "you have illustrations inside the tombs showing how many
jars of beer and wine from the Nile Delta are
to be provided to the dead," McGovern said. (Also see "Scorpion
King's Wines—Egypt's Oldest—Spiked With Meds.")
"I guess a cave is secluded, so it's good for a cemetery, but it's
also good for making wine," he added. "And then you have the wine
right there, so you can keep the ancestors happy."
Future work planned at Areni will further investigate links between the
burials and winemaking, study leader Areshian said.
Winemaking as Revolution
The discovery is important, the study team says, because winemaking is
seen as a significant social and technological innovation among prehistoric
societies.
Vine growing, for instance, heralded the emergence of new,
sophisticated forms of agriculture, Areshian said.
"They had to learn and understand the cycles of growth of the
plant," he said. "They had to understand how much water was needed,
how to prevent fungi from damaging the harvest, and how to deal with flies that
live on the grapes.
"The site gives us a new insight into the earliest phase of
horticulture—how they grew the first orchards and vineyards," he added.
"From a social perspective, for good and ill," Miller said,
"alcoholic beverages change the way we interact with each other in society."
The ancient-winery study was led by UCLA's Hans Barnard and partially
fundedby the National Geographic Society's Committee
for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)
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