How it began
At two early Neolithic village sites in present-day Georgia, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 50 kilometers south of Tbilisi, people were making grape wine in the first half of the sixth millennium BCE. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 analyzed organic compounds absorbed into pottery from the sites and dated the evidence to about 6000 to 5800 BCE. The culture is ancient and predates the modern state, but the sites lie on Georgian territory.
Before it existed
Before this study the earliest evidence for grape wine in the Near East came from the early Neolithic village of Hajji Firuz Tepe in the northwestern Zagros Mountains of Iran. The Georgian jars precede the Hajji Firuz jars by about half a millennium, which led the authors to ask which region has priority in the discovery and spread of wine culture and the domesticated grape.
How it works
The researchers tested the fabric of pottery jars for chemical traces left by grapes and combined the results with archaeobotanical evidence, including grape pollen. They concluded that the jars excavated at Shulaveri and Gadachrili probably originally contained wine and were likely used for fermentation and serving. The dating relied on short-lived botanical samples from well-defined archaeological contexts and on a Bayesian analysis of the combined data.
What lasted
The authors write that wine became central to ancient Near Eastern life, with roles in medicine, social practice and economies, and that the discovery of early sixth millennium BCE grape wine in this region is crucial to the later history of wine in Europe and the rest of the world. They describe the finds as the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East.
