8,000 Year Old Wine

My husband recently pointed me to an article that he saw on NPR about the discovery of the 8,000 year old wine from Georgia. In the previous blog Comparison of Wine to Music, Pretorius' timeline lists Georgia as one of the ancestral locations of grape growing.
In research done by McGovern et al. and available online Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus provides details on how a determination was made to establish that winemaking was in fact occurring in the early Neolithic period (ca. 6,000–5,000 BC) in the region now known as Georgia.
One of the earliest Neolithic cultures occupying the modern regions of South Georgia, Northern Armenia and Western Azerbaijan in the South Caucus is the "Shulaveri-Shomu Tepe Culture". Imagine living nearly 8,000 years ago during the Neolithic revolution when the “founder crops” of barley, einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, chickpea, pea, lentil, flax, and bitter vetch were being cultivated, harvested and stored. This assurance of a food source allowed for advances in the arts and crafts, such as architecture, weaving, dyeing, stone working, woodworking and wine making.
These ancestors possibly saw the domestication of the wild Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera sp. sylvestris), resulting in V. vinifera sp. vinifera, being hermaphroditic, didn't leave pollination to chance and provided a reliable source of grapes.

Previously, McGovern reported on the Hajji Firuz Tepe region as being the site of early winemaking based on traces of tartaric acid that could be identified on clay sherds.
In this article, wine jars from as early as ca. 6,000 BC have been confirmed for Gadachrili and Shulaveri, preceding the Hajji Firuz jars by half a millennium! In order to do this, the team analyzed five base sherds from Gadachrili and three from Shulaveri. The presence of tartaric acid and other organic acids such as malic, succinic, and citric acids was crucial in establishing the original presence of wine in these vessel sherds.
The next time you pick up a glass of wine, give a nod to the Neolithic people of Georgia who, during the great Neolithic revolution took the wild Eurasian grape (Vitis vinifera sp. sylvestris) and domesticated it, resulting in V. vinifera sp. vinifera becoming the basis of our current “wine culture”.
References:
1. Patrick McGovern, et al., Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus, PNAS 2017 : 1714728114v1-201714728. 2. David Maghradze, et al., Grape and wine culture in Georgia, the South Caucasus, BIO Web of Conferences 7, 03027 (2016), 39th World Congress of Vine and Wine.