The very very ancient history of wine: Part 1
Wine might be all the rage these days, but its creation could go back 66 million years. That’s right, the dinosaurs might have been the first to sip a lovely chardonnay (probably not literally, they prefer leafy greens, so maybe a sauv blanc). But eventually humans figured out a little bit about the process, and today we have 752 million gallons of wine made each year in the US alone. How did we get here? We’re going to look at the ancient history of wine in a three part series, starting here at the beginning.
What is wine?
Colloquially, when we order a wine at a bar, we mean a fermented beverage made from grape juice, specifically that of the species Vitis vinifera. But wine really just means any alcohol made by fermenting fruit, and wines of lots of plants have existed of both human and natural creation. When you look at the history of fermented fruits around the globe you see “wines” of all sorts from raspberries in Alaska to plum wine in Japan to Okolehao in Hawaii. If you dropped one of these fruits onto the ground on a hot summer day and waited long enough, the juice would turn mildly alcoholic (see also, the orange juice you left too long on your counter). From here on out though, when we say wine, we mean using grapes exclusively.
Where do grapes come from?
Grapes are special because they grow all over the world natively, unlike many of the other fruits that we consume. There are grapes native to the Americas, namely Vitis rotundofolia (muscadine) and Vitis labrusca (fox grape), both of which have been made into wine for hundreds of years. That’s because grapes came about a long time ago and so were able to spread across the continents. The grape that we mainly use to make wine today is Vitis vinifera, the wild version comes from the Middle East/Near East. People likely came into contact with this particular grape when we migrated out of Africa a little more than a 100,000 years ago.
Who first made wine?
No one, because wine makes itself. Grapes in particular do a good job of it. Yeasts that make alcohol live on grape skins, and when the berry is crushed and yeast meets the fruity juices inside the result is wine or, with enough oxygen, vinegar. This is why you sometimes see a drunk bee flying around after consuming sweet juices in the sun. You’ve also likely heard of birds and other mammals like monkeys eating or even making wine (monkeys throw fruit at trees to get it boozy). However, if we’re talking about humans, this falls under the Paleolithic hypothesis.
How wine was made in ancient times?
At some point, people came into contact with ancient wild grapes. Like other animals, they may have dabbled in boozy grape juice on the ground, but that doesn’t really count as discovering wine. Here’s what we think happened: Ancient hunter gatherers stored wine in leather pouches, perfect for creating a low-oxygen, high temperature environment. If they carried grapes from place to place with them still in the sack, the weight of the fruit itself would crush the fruit on the bottom, which then comes into contact with those skins and ferments. By the time our ancestors went in to eat the grapes, they wound up drinking wine instead. Lucky them!
But does this count as making wine? Well, yes and no. It all had to start somewhere, and we see this as the clear answer to the ancient history of our beloved beverage, but it’s not the same as the multi-billion dollar industry of wine making we see today. One way to draw the line is in winemaking technology. Once someone created something to specifically make wine, we have winemaking. And for that we have to go to Georgia (the country, not the state) about 8,000 years ago. Read on in part two for more.