Georgia– the oldest winemaker counting 8,000 vintages
Georgia is the oldest wine-making civilization, counting over 8,000 years of history in viticulture. An international team of researchers from the USA, France, Italy, Israel, Canada, Denmark, and Georgia proved once more the origins of winemaking started in this ancient country. The discovery was made by Anthropologist 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.
Chemical evidence of wine, dating back to 6000–5800 BC (the early Neolithic period), was obtained from residues of ancient pottery excavated in the archaeological 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.
McGovern said, “If we see the tartaric acid that shows that we have wine or a grape product.” As McGovern says, “one of the jars has a design on it that seems like a celebration of wine: People under trellis grapevine, dancing.” The oldest of these jars came from 8,000 years ago. It’s the earliest artifact ever found showing humans consuming juice from the Eurasian grapes that are the foundation of today’s wine industry.
The wine residues were recovered from large-capacity jars, which were used for fermentation, ageing and storage. In 2013, UNESCO added Qvevri, the iconic wine making clay amphora used in Georgia for wine making, to the list of Intangible Cultural Heritages of Humanity.
Prior to this discovery, the oldest chemically identified wine from Hajji Firuz Tepe (Iran) dated back to about 5400–5000 BC. These latest findings are from about 600–1,000 years earlier, indicating that winemaking was already in place in Georgia about 8,000 years ago.
“Wine was always our identity,” said David Lortkipanidze, Georgian archeologist and director of Georgian National Museum.
In June 2017, The Cité des Civilisations Du Vin in Bordeaux, France opened with a Georgian solo exhibit — “Georgia, Cradle of Viticulture.” Now time has come for the world to re-discover Georgia as the oldest wine civilization.