Study: Earliest evidence of wine found in giant, 8,000-year-old jars

At the next holiday dinner, when the discussion turns to politics and you reach for a second glass of merlot, consider this: Your social lubricant has 8,000-year-old roots. People were fermenting grapes and storing wine in massive jugs as long ago as 6000 B.C., according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new research pushes chemical evidence of wine 600 to 1,000 years before the previous oldest estimates.

“This is a big time jump,” said Patrick McGovern, an expert in ancient wines at the University of Pennsylvania Museum and an author of the new study. McGovern and his colleagues analyzed pottery jars found in the Eurasian country of Georgia that dated to the early Neolithic period.

Ancient Georgians could have stored 300 liters of wine in the jars, which are about three feet tall. Small clay bumps are clustered around the rim. These decorations, the researchers hypothesize, represent grapes.

McGovern is confident that the pottery is old. “The radiocarbon dating is very precise,” he said. “We know the dating within 200 years.” The jars were created between 6000 and 5800 B.C.

The new insights came from a break in tradition. It is common practice for archaeologists to clean ancient pottery with a gentle bath of a mild acid or base. The corrosives reveal details in the pottery often hidden beneath a crust of accumulated minerals. But these baths also erase any traces of organic compounds stuck to the pottery. In the latest excavation, the archaeologists skipped the chemical scrub. This allowed researchers to extract four organic compounds present in the potsherds: citric acid, malic acid, succinic acid and tartaric acid.