Winery Insight Featured Article - October 2006 by Timothy O. Rice

What did they drink five thousand years ago?  Would I like the wine they liked?

Those questions came to me as I started a book my wife had given me: Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viticulture by Patrick E. McGovern.  He is a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the application of chemical, molecular and DNA technology to the study of anthropology and archaeology.  In recent years, he has become closely associated with the archaeology of wine.  This book covers what we can guess about the history and spread of wine from some misty origin in Neolithic times up to the Greeks and Romans just before the birth of Christ.

McGovern tells us the key point in his very first sentence, a single grape species (Vitis vinifera) is the source of 99 percent of the world's wine today.  He traces the origin of winemaking and the spread of that species back, using all the tools at his command as well as intuition and the legends of history, to a point up in the Caucasus, somewhere near Mt. Ararat, where the Bible says Noah planted his vineyard after the flood.

That intrigued me.  If all the wine I drink today comes from the same species of grapes that the ancients used, maybe the wine they made was not too different than what winemakers today make.  Would I find there was Assyrian Chardonnay, Egyptian Merlot, and Persian Cabernet?

I read eagerly.  Although the technology used is impressive and the book reads like an archaeological episode of the hit CSI TV series, determining the varietal of a dried up stain on the side of an 8,000 year-old piece of pottery appears to be something we do not have yet.  The best the book could tell me was that sometimes it appears the wine might have been "white", but usually it seems to have been "red".

Too bad, but there was plenty to keep my interest.  McGovern showed how both Mesopotamian legends and the Bible could be used to implicate the area around Mt. Ararat as the source of wine, both after a massive flood event.  He traced the archaeological evidence of the spread of wine down through the mountains into Mesopotamia, first as an imported product from well to the North, brought downriver at great cost, then from closer and closer to the land between the rivers.  He shows the spread of it down through Palestine and across the desert to Egypt, where the Pharoahs established great vineyards of their own.  He shows the migration of wine to the west, carried by traders to Greece and beyond.  If you like that sort of tale and a small dollop of hard science, it is fascinating in its detail and well told.

McGovern tells us of how religion and the power of kings came to center on wine (the Assyrians ripped out the vineyards when they plundered a rival, so that the ruler could not supply wine for the ceremonies).  He shows us how the economics worked, the trade routes that were followed, and the techniques used to produce the wine.  He describes the customs that arose around it, the way it was drunk, and the importance it had in the lives of people.

Unfortunately, along the way he convinced me I would not like what the ancients drank.  For one thing, a lot of the evidence mentions grape pips and skins found in the remains of jars.  While I have seen sediment in wine bottles, I don't recall ever seeing seeds and recognizably large pieces of grape skins.  The thought that it would be sold that way took me by surprise.  So did the evidence that the ancients drank out of the jars with long flexible straws, at least partially to avoid drinking in the detrius floating at the top.  I breathed a silent thanks for modern filtration systems and read on.

Wines also tended to go bad quickly, so additives were used to try to prevent or delay the process -- or simply to mask the bad taste.  These included tree resins, myrhh, and many other substances that made my mind boggle.  I suppose I should have more of an open mind on this; after all, Greek Retsina is wine with tree resin in it and the Greeks still seem to like it.  But I have also heard it is an acquired taste that doesn't come easily.

At the end, I cannot say I felt the wines of that day would have much appeal to me.  I appreciate modern technology and the advances of modern winemaking even more now.  But I still think this is a very enjoyable and valuable book, and I encourage you to add it to your collection if it appeals to you.