text: On a small rise less than 20 miles south of Tbilisi, Georgia, a clutch of round, mud-brick houses rises from a green, fertile river valley. The mound is called Gadachrili Gora, and the Stone Age farmers who lived here 8,000 years ago were grape lovers: Their rough pottery is decorated with bunches of the fruit, and analysis of pollen from the site suggests the wooded hillsides nearby were once decked with grapevines. 
   
   In a paper published today in the journal PNAS, an international team of archaeologists has conclusively shown what all those grapes were for. The people living at Gadachrili Gora and a nearby village were the world’s earliest known vintners—producing wine on a large scale as early as 6,000 B.C., a time when prehistoric humans were still reliant on stone and bone tools. 
   
   Excavating the overlapping circular houses at the site, the team found broken pottery, including the rounded bases of large jars, embedded in the floors of the village houses. More samples were found at Shulaveri Gora, another Stone Age village site a mile or so from Gadachrili that was partially excavated in the 1960s. (See “Ghost of the Vine” for more about the search for the roots of winemaking.) 
   
   When the samples were analyzed by University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern, he found tartaric acid, a chemical “fingerprint” that shows wine residues were present in fragments of pottery from both sites. 
   
   Combined with the grape decorations on the outside of the jars, ample grape pollen in the site’s fine soil, and radiocarbon dates from 5,800 B.C. to 6,000 B.C., the chemical analysis indicates the people at Gadachrili Gora were the world’s earliest winemakers. (Tipplers at a Chinese site called Jiahu were making fermented beverages from a mixture of grains and wild fruit a thousand years earlier.) 
   
   Because they didn’t find many grape seeds or stems preserved in the village’s soil, archaeologists think the wine was made in the nearby hills, close to where the grapes were grown. 
   
   “They were pressing it in cooler environments, fermenting it, and then pouring it into smaller jugs and transporting it to the villages when it was ready to drink,” says University of Toronto archaeologist Stephen Batiuk, who co-directed the joint expedition alongside archaeologist Mindia Jalabdze of the Georgian National Museum. 
   
   In later periods, winemakers used pine resin or herbs to prevent wine from spoiling or cover up unpleasant tastes, the same way modern wine producers use sulfites. McGovern’s chemical analysis didn’t find any such residues, suggesting that these were early winemaking experiments – and that the wine was a seasonal drink, produced and consumed before it had a chance to turn vinegary. “They don’t seem to have put tree resin with it, making it the first pure wine,” McGovern says. “Maybe they hadn’t yet discovered that tree resins were helpful.” 
   
   The evidence adds a new wrinkle to our understanding of the Neolithic, a pivotal period when humans were first learning to farm, settling down and domesticating crops and animals. The gradual process, known as the Neolithic Revolution, began around 10,000 B.C. in Anatolia, a few hundred miles west of Gadachrili. 
   
   It’s increasingly clear that it didn’t take long for people to turn their thoughts to alcohol: Just a few thousand years after the first wild grasses were domesticated, the people at Gadachrili had not only learned the art of fermentation but were apparently improving, breeding, and harvesting vitis vinifera, the European grape. “They’re working out horticultural methods, how you transplant it, how you produce it,” McGovern says. “It shows just how inventive the human species is.” 
   
   View Images Organic residues recovered from the remains of ceramic vessels such as this provide the earliest evidence of winemaking. Such large, open-mouthed pottery vessels are similar in shape to qvevris, traditional winemaking vessels still found in many Georgian cellars today. Photograph by Mindia Jalabadze and courtesy National Museum of Georgia 
   
   View Images Large, beeswax-lined qvevri are still used by Georgian winemakers, who bury the jars up to the neck and use them for generations. Photograph by Brian Finke, Nat Geo Image Collection 
   
   Georgia, nestled in the Caucasus mountains not far from where the Neolithic Revolution began, is still wine-crazy 8,000 year later. It has more than 500 local grape varieties, a sign that people have been breeding and growing grapes here for a long time. Even in bustling downtown Tbilisi, grapevines cling to crumbling Soviet-era apartment blocks. 
   
   “The region’s wine culture has deep historical roots,” says David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum. “Large jars similar to the Neolithic vessels are still used to make wine in Georgia today.” 
   
   Stanford University archaeologist Patrick Hunt says the results show that Stone Age people lived complex, rich lives, with interests and concerns we’d be familiar with today. “Wine fermentation isn’t a survival necessity. It shows that human beings back then were about more than utilitarian activity,” says Hunt. “There’s far greater sophistication even in the transitional Neolithic than we had any clue about.” ||||| Image copyright AFP Image caption Some of the Neolithic jars bore decorations of grapes 
   
   Scientists say 8,000-year-old pottery fragments have revealed the earliest evidence of grape wine-making. 
   
   The earthenware jars containing residual wine compounds were found in two sites south of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, researchers said. 
   
   Some of the jars bore images of grape clusters and a man dancing. 
   
   Previously, the earliest evidence of wine-making was from pottery dating from about 7,000 years ago found in north-western Iran. 
   
   The latest finds were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). 
   
   "We believe this is the oldest example of the domestication of a wild-growing Eurasian grapevine solely for the production of wine," said co-author Stephen Batiuk, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto. 
   
   "Wine is central to civilisation as we know it in the West. As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies and society in the ancient Near East." 
   
   Traditional methods 
   
   The pottery jars were discovered in two Neolithic villages, called Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, about 50km (30 miles) south of Tbilisi, researchers said. 
   
   Telltale chemical signs of wine were discovered in eight jars, the oldest one dating from about 5,980 BC. 
   
   Large jars called qvevri, similar to the ancient ones, are still used for wine-making in Georgia, said David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum who helped lead the research. 
   
   Mr Batiuk said the wine was probably made in a similar way to the qvevri method today "where the grapes are crushed and the fruit, stems and seeds are all fermented together". 
   
   Previously, the earliest evidence of grape wine-making had been found in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and dated to 5,400-5,000 BC. 
   
   In 2011, a wine press and fermentation jars from about 6,000 years ago were found in a cave in Armenia. 
   
   The world's earliest non-grape based wine is believe to be a fermented alcoholic beverage of rice, honey and fruit found in China and dating to about 7,000 BC. ||||| Evidence of the world's oldest known winemaking has been uncovered in the nation of Georgia, with a chemical analysis of Stone Age pottery jars fingerprinting an ancient drop going back some 8,000 years. 
   
   They say wine improves with age, and if that's true, the discovery is truly sublime – and pushes back the world's earliest evidence of modern-style viticulture by up to 1,000 years, trumping earlier finds in the Zagros Mountains of Iran dating to around 5400–5000 BCE. 
   
   The discovery, made by researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada and the Georgian National Museum, is also a fitting one. 
   
   Georgia, which has a long heritage of winemaking, is positioned at a crossroads between Western Asia and Eastern Europe, and the grape identified in jar fragments excavated from two Neolithic-era villages is Vitis vinifera – aka the 'Eurasian grapevine', from which nearly all kinds of modern wine originate. 
   
   Representative early Neolithic jar (Mindia Jalabadze/National Museum of Georgia) 
   
   "The infinite range of flavours and aromas of today's 8,000–10,000 grape varieties are the end result of the domesticated Eurasian grapevine being transplanted and crossed with wild grapevines elsewhere over and over again," says archaeologist Stephen Batiuk from the University of Toronto. 
   
   "The Eurasian grapevine that now accounts for 99.9 percent of wine made in the world today, has its roots in Caucasia." 
   
   The ceramic shards were uncovered in digs conducted in the ancient villages of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, with the team later confirming the presence of a number of acids found in wine taken from the residue of eight jars: tartaric, malic, succinic, and citric acid. 
   
   The researchers say this chemical evidence is a snapshot of early human civilisation toward the end of the Stone Age, as it encountered new environments and made the best use of whatever resources found there – which in this case included cultivating the beginnings of all modern wine. 
   
   "In essence, what we are examining is how the Neolithic package of agricultural activity, tool-making and crafts that developed further south in modern Iraq, Syria, and Turkey adapted as it was introduced into different regions with different climate and plant life," Batiuk says. 
   
   "The horticultural potential of the south Caucasus was bound to lead to the domestication of many new and different species, and innovative 'secondary' products were bound to emerge." 
   
   Gadachrili Gora (Stephen Batiuk) 
   
   As innovative as this early viticulture was, though, it wasn't the first time ancient humans mashed grapes into a fermented liquid and decided to drink it. 
   
   That honour belongs to the long-ago people of Jiahu in the Yellow Valley of China, where researchers previously found evidence of an even earlier kind of wine production dating back to around 7000 BCE. 
   
   But this heady drop wasn't the wine we know and love today, and incorporated hawthorn fruit, rice, and honey mead, in addition to grapes. That means the latest Georgian discovery still takes out the title of the oldest pure wine. 
   
   It's thought the prehistoric imbibers of Georgia may have stored their wine in large jars underground, leaving them to ferment. 
   
   Some of these jars were pretty big – a comparable jar uncovered in a nearby site holds 300 litres (79 gallons), which could have held the contents of 400 wine bottles today. 
   
   It's amazing to think that 8,000 years ago the world's earliest winemakers were producing something very similar to the wine we consume today – and what's even more startling is it hints we probably had lots more in common with these ancient ancestors too. 
   
   "Wine fermentation isn't a survival necessity," archaeologist Patrick Hunt from Stanford University, who wasn't involved with the research, told National Geographic. 
   
   "It shows that human beings back then were about more than utilitarian activity. There's far greater sophistication even in the transitional Neolithic than we had any clue about." 
   
   The findings are reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ||||| The earliest biomolecular archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East, ca. 6,000–5,800 BC during the early Neolithic Period, was obtained by applying state-of-the-art archaeological, archaeobotanical, climatic, and chemical methods to newly excavated materials from two sites in Georgia in the South Caucasus. Wine is central to civilization as we know it in the West. As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society in the ancient Near East. This wine culture subsequently spread around the globe. Viniculture illustrates human ingenuity in developing horticultural and winemaking techniques, such as domestication, propagation, selection of desirable traits, wine presses, suitable containers and closures, and so on. 
   
   Abstract 
   
   Chemical analyses of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics from sites in Georgia in the South Caucasus region, dating to the early Neolithic period (ca. 6,000–5,000 BC), provide the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East, at ca. 6,000–5,800 BC. The chemical findings are corroborated by climatic and environmental reconstruction, together with archaeobotanical evidence, including grape pollen, starch, and epidermal remains associated with a jar of similar type and date. The very large-capacity jars, some of the earliest pottery made in the Near East, probably served as combination fermentation, aging, and serving vessels. They are the most numerous pottery type at many sites comprising the so-called “Shulaveri-Shomutepe Culture” of the Neolithic period, which extends into western Azerbaijan and northern Armenia. The discovery of early sixth millennium BC grape wine in this region is crucial to the later history of wine in Europe and the rest of the world.
target: – Wine has been used as a "social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity" throughout the ages. Now, a discovery just south of Tbilisi details just how far back through the ages the beverage has existed, the BBC reports. Per a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, archaeologists found 8,000-year-old pottery shards in the nation of Georgia indicating wine was once made there in earthenware jars, the earliest evidence ever of grape-based wine production. Before the discovery of the fragments from eight jars (the oldest from circa 5980BC) in the Neolithic villages of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, the most ancient proof of grape winemaking came from Iraq, dating between 5000BC and 5400BC. Testing of the Georgian pieces showed evidence of a slew of acids from wine that had been made inside the erstwhile vessels. The jars also featured images of grapes and a man dancing, and National Geographic notes the presence of grape pollen in the soil. Scientists believe the jars may have been stored underground during the fermentation process and, based on an intact jar found at a site nearby, were so large they could fit about 400 of today's wine bottles, per a release. There's even a link to modern-day vino production: The old-time jars are strikingly similar to the large qvevri jars used today in Georgia. Because wine wasn't crucial to living in Stone Age times, one scientist not involved in the study tells National Geographic that the find shows "far greater sophistication" during that time period than previously suspected. China still holds the overall wine record, however: Evidence there for a boozy rice-and-honey based concoction dates back to 7000BC. (Archaeologists found a tiny stone that holds unparalleled ancient Greek art.)