How did humans discover wine?
8.000 years of history.
Some History
The earliest evidence of grape wine-making, pottery fragments, are around 8,000 year old, from Georgia. That means the Stone Age people were already savoring fine red wine.
Even so, in China, 9,000 years ago they were already producing wine-like beverages, but it is not clear if they used grapes and it was mixed with ingredients such as rice, honey, or other fruits.
In the next few thousand years wine established itself in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
The Egyptians were the first to document the process of winemaking, a tradition introduced to them at least 4,700 years ago.
Ancient Greece is famous for the importance it gave to wine, especially through Dionysus, who the Romans incorporated and became Bacchus, the god of wine. Dionysus was one of the most active gods in the Greek myths and the festivals, Dionysia, or the Roman Bacchanalia, were highly popular.
The other cultural group who gave a lot of relevance to wine was, of course, the Jews, as often depicted in the Tanakh and the Bible. This naturally passed down to the Christians, who use it to celebrate one of their most meaningful ceremonies, the Eucharist, a ritual in which the wine becomes Christ’s blood.
In Islam wine is forbidden, as all other alcoholic beverages, but the Quran mentions that the righteous will enjoy the drink after their death.
Wine became one of the most produced and consumed drinks in Europe, and through colonization and trade it spread around the globe.
Now, not only France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are known, for their wine, but also Argentina, Chile, California, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
With such an expansion of the wine market, two categories of wine arise, the Old World wine, which includes the European and the Maghrebi wine, and the New World, which includes all the rest
Happy little accidents
Most researchers agree that the discovery of wine, like many other great discoveries, was most likely an accident.
The first wines were probably leftover berry juice that fermented at the bottom of a container.
The early accidental wine producers would likely have picked and saved a bunch of tiny fruits in a clay jar long enough for it to start to produce alcohol due to the natural yeast present in the fruit.
As they probably began to realize that this juice had a nice taste and, better yet, left them a bit “queazy,” they started to pick fruits, in particular grapes, for this purpose.
So this small and barely noticeable accident led to 8,000 years of history and tradition deeply rooted in our cultures.
Cheers to that.
