- In German only: "Eine gute Flasche Wein kann uns heute helfen, Geschichte nachzuempfinden. Prost!" Reinhard Renneberg (2023): Biotechnologie für Einsteiger, 6.Auflage, SAV Heidelberg (im Druck)
English science journalist Tom Standage explains in A History of the World in 6 Glasses that ancient Greece was the first place where wine drinking became quite common. The Mediterranean climate favoured the cultivation of grapes and all social classes drank wine. It also very practically suppressed dangerous germs in drinking water. As is well known, Napoleon's soldiers later carried a flask in their knapsacks to add red wine to potentially dangerous drinking water. The Roman Empire adopted a great deal from the Greeks, from aqueducts, columns, and togas, to the culture of wine. With the Roman conquests, wine also spread. Wine became forever associated with power, taste and dolce vita...
Professor Patrick McGovern from the University of Pennsylvania has a dream job: he combines state-of-the-art chemical analysis with classical archaeology. He researches worldwide for historical traces of wine. To this end, he has developed his "Noah hypothesis": The biblical Noah was a professional vintner long before the ark was built. According to legend, he landed with his ark on Mount Ararat (then Armenia, now eastern Turkey) and soon started growing wine there. In fact, historically documented, modern agriculture was founded on Mount Ararat.
McGovern searches for the roots of wine with modern DNA comparisons, first in wild wine relatives. The wild Eurasian wine (Vitis vinifera sylvestris) is found from Spain to Central Asia. Our present-day cultivated wine is descended from it. McGovern found it in the Turkish Taurus Mountains (where the Tigris springs). The original wine still grows there today.
His international team collected everything on the subject of wine from the local winegrowers, including folklore surrounding the origins of viticulture. The researchers also found ancient clay shards with wine residues with the corpus delicti: the salt of tartaric acid (tartrate) already researched by the great French microbiologist Louis Pasteur. It directly suggests wine.
Fifteen years ago, McGovern believed he had found the oldest traces of wine and barley beer, 7,400 years old, in the Iranian village of Hajii Firuz Tepe. But afterwards, in Jiahu, Henan province, China, in addition to the oldest "oracle bones" with Chinese pictorial characters, even older, 9,000-year-old, clay shards were tracked down. McGovern took sixteen Chinese shards with wine remains to the Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. He also shipped 90 sealed metal vessels from the Shang Dynasty to America.
In the laboratory, he combined modern analytical techniques such as gas and liquid chromatography, infrared spectrometry and isotope analysis. His result: The Chinese wine contained a complex mixture of tartrate, fermented rice, beeswax and hawthorn fruit (with high sugar content and the natural yeasts for alcoholic fermentation).
In the Shang dynasty, between the 18th and 11th centuries BC, Chinese oenology had made considerable progress. The analysed wine of the Shang emperors from the bronze vessels again contained tartrate, plus traces of chrysanthemum, resin from pine trees (reminiscent of modern Greek retsina), traces of camphor, olive and tannic acids, and wormwood.
Curious, I asked McGovern directly via SKYPE: "And, did you - for sake of curiosity - try to taste this historic Shang wine?" His short answer: "Of course... NOT!" No, he did NOT taste the aromatic Shang wine himself: The ancient vessels contained... up to 20% lead in the wine! Wine is known to be thousands of times more acidic than water (pH values of 2.8 to 3.8) and is excellent at dissolving heavy metals out of the storage tanks.
According to McGovern, a secure supply of alcoholic beverages was apparently a basic need of the human community much earlier than previously assumed: he even recognises a wise strategy in the early art of fermentation: "Running energy-rich sugar and alcohol into yourself was a fabulous solution for surviving in a hostile and resource-poor environment."
In the Neolithic period, the craft of alcohol magicians spread rapidly throughout the world. McGovern's bold thesis: agriculture and thus the entire Neolithic Revolution around 11,000 years ago was ultimately the result of man's urge for drink and intoxication. Alcohol was therefore a sort of "mother's milk of civilisation".
The biologist Robert Dudley asked himself: And why alcohol at all? Early humans and other primates apparently had a preference for fermented fruits for millions of years. Fermented fruits were easier to smell and therefore easier to find. They provided twice as many calories as unfermented sugars (as beer belly drinkers know painfully well).
And, as with us today, the mild intoxication made us forget the problems of the jungle for a short time. The alcohol concentrations were low, luckily, because fully drunk monkeys were an easier prey for predators. For mammals, ethyl alcohol is a neurotoxin. Its blood concentration in humans is measured in parts per thousand. In times when people ate fermented fruit for hunger or fun, only those who could break down or excrete this poison as quickly as possible could survive.
American palaeogeneticists have studied the evolution of the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) in the approximately 70-million-year history of primates. By comparing the genetic material of 17 primates, the researchers reconstructed a mutation of the ADH4 gene about ten million years ago in the common ancestors of today's humans and apes. How this happened is still unclear.
It was only after this gene mutation that hominids could enjoy fermented fruit without danger and regret. They had moved their residence from the trees to the ground, and there, instead of picking fruit fresh from the tree, they ate plenty of fermented fallen fruit. The ADH enzyme change greatly helped humans when they cultivated cereals and brewed easily digestible beer from the hard-to-digest grains.
McGovern suspects that when hunting and foraging, grapes were first stuffed into woven baskets or hollow gourds, because ceramics did not yet exist. On the way to the horde camp, the grapes were crushed by their own weight and their juice was fermented by adhering yeasts. In the Areni 1 cave in Armenia, archaeologists found wine presses and vessels. Sealable ceramics protected the wine from oxygen and thus from acetic acid fermentation. Voilá! Wine was now available all year round. By the end of our video call, McGovern, happily stated:
"A good bottle of wine can help us recreate history today. Cheers!"