Grape domestication

[Heber]

Georgia is often mentioned as the region of grape domestication and earliest wine-making. Georgia keeps their traditional wine making having unique grape variety aging their wines in clay vessels known as Kvevri. Europeans age their red wines in oak barrels.

Georgian Kveri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvevri

I would love to get aDNA from this culture and from these wine residues and prehistoric grape pips.

"Jalabadze is talking about a Neolithic culture called Shulaveri-Shomu whose mound sites in Georgia arose during a wet cycle in the southern Caucasus and date back to first inklings of agriculture, before the time of metal. The villagers used stone tools, tools of bone. They crafted gigantic pots the size of refrigerators. Such vessels—precursors to the fabled kvevri—held grains and honey, but also wine. How can we know? One such pot is decorated with bunches of grapes. Biochemical analyses of the pottery, carried out by McGovern, shows evidence of tartaric acid, a telltale clue of grape brewing. These artifacts are 8,000 years old. Georgia’s winemaking heritage predates other ancient wine-related finds in Armenia and Iran by centuries. This year, researchers are combing Shulaveri-Shomu sites for prehistoric grape pips......

“Typical human migrations involved mass slaughter,” says Stephen Batiuk, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto. “You know, migration by the sword. Population replacement. But not the people who brought wine culture with them. They spread out and then lived side-by-side with host cultures. They established symbiotic relationships.”

http://nationalgeographic.org/projec...t-of-the-vine/

It may explain the success of cultures like Bell Beaker and the significance of the Beaker itself.

http://blogs.sapo.pt/cloud/file/eb6b...l%20beaker.pdf

[Volat]

I don't care about their aDNA. Some red Georgian wines are delicious. Highly praised by people who love red wines. Georgian best wines don't cost a leg and an arm as famous French wines.

[Heber]

It’s uncertain where, exactly, viticulture began, but the strongest theories suggest that it arose between the Black and Caspian Seas in Transcaucasia (which includes Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan), as well as in eastern Turkey, the Levant, and northern Iran. The earliest evidence for grape domestication, in the form of 8,000-year-old grape seeds, was found just north of Armenia at Shulaveri gorge in Georgia. The oldest example of wine—7,400-year-old residue on clay pots—was discovered just south of Armenia at Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran. Across the Black Sea in northern Greece, findings from a settlement called Dikili Tash suggest that grapes were being crushed into wine there 6,300 years ago. But Areni-1, at 6,100 years old, is the first place where grapes and winemaking tools have been discovered together. To put things in perspective, it’s not until a millennium or so later that wine shows up in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs.

http://www.saveur.com/world-oldest-winery-armenia

http://www.peopleofar.com/2014/12/17...-from-armenia/

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The Kura Araxes is also where R1b aDNA was found in the latest Lazaridis paper.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/30/9190.abstract

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And it is on the route from Kura Araxes, Kuban, Azov, Maikop, Yamnaya, Corded Ware and could be the source of the missing R1b- L51 branch.

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The Caucasus sits on the crossroads of the Eurasian land mass and we can expect more revealing aDNA from this region.

[Heber]

Genomics breakthrough paves way for climate-tolerant wine grape varieties
October 17, 2016

A new sequencing technology, combined with a new computer algorithm that can yield detailed information about complex genomes of various organisms, has been used to produce a high-quality draft genome sequence of cabernet sauvignon, the world's most popular red wine grape variety, reports a UC Davis genomics expert.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-genomic...-wine.html#jCp

http://phys.org/news/2016-10-genomic...rant-wine.html

[Jean M]

I have only just seen http://www.wineofancientegypt.com/

There is a book chapter on the project too: Maria Rosa Guasch-Jané, An Interdisciplinary Study on the Ancient Egyptian Wines: The Egywine Project, Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection, Volume 10058 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 737-748.

This article presents the research results of the ‘Irep en Kemet’ Project that studies the Ancient Egyptian wine culture and the newly developed website of the research project [www.​wineofancientegy​pt.​com] to transfer the knowledge and disseminate the results. For the first time, the corpus of the viticulture and winemaking scenes in the ancient Egyptian private tombs has been developed, together with the bibliographical and scene-detail databases. The second phase of the ‘Irep en Kemet’ website includes an interactive archaeological map of Egypt with the viticulture and winemaking scenes, and also the databases and the results of the research. Moreover, the objectives and preliminary results of the EGYWINE project that investigates the wine jars and wine inscriptions, and the ancient DNA of the Egyptian wines, are presented.

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10....319-48496-9_59

[Jean M]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0824141201.htm

World's oldest Italian wine just discovered: Ancient pottery tests positive for wine

Italian wine residue has been found from the Copper Age, debunking current belief wine growing and wine production in Italy developed during the Middle Bronze Age.

Chemical analysis conducted on ancient pottery could dramatically predate the commencement of winemaking in Italy. A large storage jar from the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC) tests positive for wine. This finding published in Microchemical Journal is significant as it's the earliest discovery of wine residue in the entire prehistory of the Italian peninsula. Traditionally, it's been believed wine growing and wine production developed in Italy in the Middle Bronze Age (1300-1100 B.C.) as attested just by the retrieval of seeds, providing a new perspective on the economy of that ancient society.

Actual paper: Davide Tanasi, Enrico Greco, Valeria Di Tullio, Donatella Capitani, Domenica Gullì, Enrico Ciliberto. 1 H- 1 H NMR 2D-TOCSY, ATR FT-IR and SEM-EDX for the identification of organic residues on Sicilian prehistoric pottery. Microchemical Journal, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.microc.2017.08.010

[razyn]

I haven't read the paper, but the quotation doesn't make it obvious to me that this wine, of which a residue has been found in an ancient storage jar in present Italy, was from locally grown grapes (or was locally fermented). Could have been imported; could previously have been in skins. From somewhere, a boat ride distant from Italy.

A large storage jar from the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC) tests positive for wine. This finding published in Microchemical Journal is significant as it's the earliest discovery of wine residue in the entire prehistory of the Italian peninsula. Traditionally, it's been believed wine growing and wine production developed in Italy in the Middle Bronze Age (1300-1100 B.C.)

OTOH it's a pretty good argument, as stated, against the prevailing wisdom that Bell Beakers were necessarily for drinking something like beer or mead [because wine was supposed to be unknown in the region as early as the Bell Beaker era]. This storage jar is about a thousand years older than the Beaker era.

[Volat]

Georgian wine is the oldest (8,000 ybp) as per Guinness Book of records. The entry about Georgian wine being the oldest was made recently : http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/...79-oldest-wine

Chemical evidence of wine, dating back to 6000–5800 BC (the early Neolithic period), was obtained from residues of ancient pottery excavated in the archeological sites of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 50 km south of Tbilisi in Georgia. The residues were identified as wine since they contained tartaric acid, which only occurs in large amounts in the Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera) in the Middle East and the wine made from it. The detection of other organic acids (malic, citric and succinic), also found in the Eurasian grape, provided confirmatory evidence.

The wine residues were recovered from large-capacity jars, which were probably used for fermentation, ageing and storage. Prior to this discovery, the oldest chemically identified wine from Hajji Firuz Tepe (Iran) dated back to about 5400–5000 BC. These new findings are from about 600–1,000 years earlier, and indicate that wine-making and possibly viticulture were already in place about 8,000 years ago.

The discovery was made by Prof. Patrick McGovern, a molecular archaeologist from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and lead author of the study "Early Neolithic Wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus", published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on 13 November 2017, and scientists from institutions in Georgia, France, Italy, Israel, Canada, Denmark and the USA, who participated in the joint “Research Project for the Study of Georgian Grapes and Wine Culture".