The Ancients - The Origins of Wine

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Wine is one of the most popular alcoholic beverages in the world. But its popularity dates back thousands of years. Throughout ancient history, wine was without doubt the drink of choice for all manner of cultures throughout the Mediterranean. So what did winemaking look like over 2000 years ago? Where and when did it start? And how did ancient winemakers transform vine-picked grapes into the ancient world’s favourite drink?In this episode of the Ancients - suggested by our listener Todd Abrams - Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Emlyn Dodd to discover how winemaking spread across the Mediterranean, and explore how old the practice of winemaking really is. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Ella Blaxill. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're covering a subject that was suggested to us by one of you. A couple of months back, we received this great suggestion from ancient listener Todd.

Hi Tristan, this is Todd. I really enjoyed your recent episode on the origins of olive oil. I would love to know more about the emergence of winemaking. Where and when did it start? How did it spread throughout the Mediterranean? And what was its cultural and economic significance in the ancient world. Cheers. Well, Todd, you legend. Today's episode is going to be all about what you've suggested, the origins of wine, the emergence of winemaking. How far back into prehistory does this practice go? To explain all our guest today is Dr. Emlyn Dodd from the University of London. Emlyn is a brilliant academic who I've known for a few years now and what's more, he's based in London so we were able to record this awesome interview in person at the Spotify studio. I really do hope you enjoy and here's Emlyn.

Emlyn, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast. It's great to be back here, thank you. The first time we did an interview together and the last time was right at the beginning of the ancients, more than three years ago in lockdown. That was over Zoom

and you were in Australia. Now we are together in central London. We've made it. We've made it in a very cool Spotify studio too to talk about

an amazing topic as well, the origins of wine. The origins of this beverage stretches back thousands of years deep into prehistory. It's got an awesome story. It does. It does. It goes back thousands more than we initially expected as well. I mean, only recently has evidence been emerging that pushes our kind of understanding of early wine production back, but also our understanding of the domestication of the grapevine back too. There was a study published just last year, which has pushed back where we think domestication of the grapevine back too. There was a study published just last year, which has pushed back where we think domestication happened over 3000 years. So

every decade, our understanding gets pushed back further and built in new and exciting ways. And you mentioned a grapevine, and this blows me away straight away. Does that mean that all of our different wines today originate from one particular grapevine? So there's been a lot of kind of work done on this, and some of the most exciting work is around the area of ancient DNA, which is essentially what this study that was published last year talked about. And they traced grapevines as a kind of species back tens, hundreds of thousands of years, all the way back to this supposed origin point, and then tried to map how it's splintered off since then. And they came up with some fantastic

work, which has really shown that there was domestication events throughout the Paleolithic era, throughout the Neolithic era, and that grapevine has been kind of evolving in lots of different ways over hundreds of thousands of years to finally arrive where we are today. And then how wine production maps onto this is equally as interesting. And our earliest evidence goes back 8,000 years for now, but who knows, maybe we'll be able to push it back further in the future as techniques improve. That's incredible. Before the whole domestication happens, was this wild grapevine in Eurasia, do we know whereabouts this was growing, where it was almost happy to grow in? So the grapevine as a wild species grew all across the Mediterranean for the most part. Its wild habitats extends all around the Mediterranean basin apart from some of North Africa. But it also grew across the Feltow

Crescent and then this kind of region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. And it started as well to, we think, go up some of the river valleys. It was quite comfortable growing up river valleys, up the Danube, for example, so pushing a little bit further into Central Europe. And it's not really until we start seeing human exploitation or early people exploiting the grapevine that it starts being moved into new zones that it wasn't necessarily growing wild in. And I think one of the most interesting things these days is that we've got this enormous history of the wild grapevine. We've got the fact that 99% of the wine today comes from one type of grape, if you trace it back all the way. But the wild grapevine that gave origin to

all of this is endangered in some areas now. It's almost extinct in some parts of the Mediterranean. And this is things like habitat loss and people removing its natural habitat and us cultivating and domesticating into new and different forms. And we're just wiping out the wild grapevine in some areas. So we're almost losing our origin point, as it were, in some ways. That's a horrific fact, but it's also extraordinary to think how different times must have been. I mean, you mentioned the word Paleolithic earlier, so like the Ice Age, so before it's domesticated. But to think at that time, the hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age, they could have consumed from this grapevine and almost not knowing that this will later be wine. Yeah, it's absolutely right. And there's obviously a lot of theoretical and hypothetical work that's

been done around this. It's worth saying up front, we have no evidence for wine before the Neolithic. We've got no evidence of Paleolithic wine, as it were. But there's been lots of theoretical work done on, obviously, the grapevine was around in its wild form. Perhaps it was starting to domesticate, as these kind of new DNA studies are showing. But what might man's or people's interaction have been like with this wild grapevine? It's perfectly reasonable to think that they would have seen it around them in the environment. They would have been collecting grapes and using them as food and energy sources. They're obviously good sources of sugar and nutrition.

They might have been collecting them in baskets or skins. And then if some of the berries ruptured and the juice came out and the juice started to spontaneously ferment with the wild yeast that's on the grape skins, perhaps they then drank that and then realised that it was quite nice. And they got a bit of a buzz out of it and it was a pleasant experience. And then maybe they started trying to recreate that. But as I said, we've got absolutely no scientific evidence for this yet. It's all very theoretical and hypothetical. But it is within the realm of possibility. for this yet. It's all very theoretical and hypothetical, but it is within the realm of possibility. Perhaps at some point in time, as our archaeological and scientific techniques improve, we'll be able to pinpoint some Paleolithic remains that maybe will show early people

interacting with the grapevine like this. It's a plausible theory. Hey, on the ancients, we're always here for plausible theories, so that is so, so cool. If I want to talk a bit more about the kind of sources you have available, what types of evidence do you have to try and learn more about the early stages of wine production? Well, as archaeologists and historians, there is a wide range of material that we work with to try and come at this from lots of different angles because our source material is so sparse and especially in these prehistoric phases. A lot of the material comes from ceramics, which are a crucial piece of source material in every archaeologist's toolkit, especially crucial for wine because a lot of early production and storage and consumption happened using ceramic containers or jars or vessels of different kinds. But equally as important to our understanding is botanical material. So archaeobotany as a field is extremely integral to our understanding is botanical material. So archaeobotany as a field is extremely integral to our understanding of early, early wine production. And a lot of the material coming

out of these prehistoric sites is archaeobotanical in nature, things like grape seeds and pips and skins and residues. And the kind of third really important component as an archaeologist or a scientist is looking at new scientific methods that are emerging. So we can now untangle the residues of material that have been absorbed into certain materials like ceramics and pinpoint the chemicals that are in these residues and then use that to try and understand what liquids or products were once in contact with these ceramics. So there's a whole range of different methods we can use now, which are all equally as important to unravelling this story of wine. I just love these advances in science, which allows you to find these residues on pieces of pottery and ceramics, more than 5,000, 6,000 years

old. Is there any literature whatsoever that refers to potential origins of wine, or is it literally you just have to use the archaeology? I'm sure you'll get different answers to this, depending on whether you're talking to archaeologists or historians or experts in mythology. As an archaeologist, I think the best and most reliable evidence we have these days is the archaeological and the scientific data. We've got lots of, let's say, origin myths and stories from all across antiquity about wine, but a lot of that has to be taken with a word of caution. There's a lot of cultural bias that gets put into these kinds of myths. So the best and most reliable evidence is the archaeobotany, the scientific analysis, looking at the archaeological material, and then new and exciting techniques like ancient DNA, as we were talking about before, is really starting to play

a new role in building our understanding in different ways. But if we do look at the historical sources, the literature and the myths that are around this from antiquity, we get a bit of an insight, which occasionally marries up quite nicely with some of the archaeology or the scientific evidence. We hear about Dionysus as a god in later Greek times, coming from places like Phoenicia or Crete or Lydia or Phrygia. So these kinds of stories of Dionysus coming from faraway lands to the Aegean or to what is now Greece. And that, interestingly enough, seems to map onto the trajectories we have of wine at the moment originating in this fertile crescent region or kind of this trans Caucasian region and then moving its way west and south across the Mediterranean. So perhaps we can imagine Dionysus or some form of cultural memory being given to Dionysus that these cultures have

from long, long ago about when wine arrived in their region from these different areas. And we also need to remember that we can't just come at this from a Greco-Roman viewpoint, that there's origin myths and justifications given to wine from many different ancient cultures. And Mesopotamia and Persia is another fantastic example where we have stories like that of King Jamshid, who was quite fond of grapes in the Persian kind of culture, and he stored grapes to ensure that he had a year-round supply in big jars. One day, he stored his grapes for too long, and one of his consorts drank the muck that was in this container and fell into a deep sleep, whereas they thought that she'd be poisoned because it was bad grapes. They realised that

when she fell into this deep sleep and actually had quite a good time, that they'd try to recreate this. Then King Jamshid ordered that more bad grape juice be made so that they could all enjoy this wine-infused slumber that had happened. I love how entwined all these different mythological trends are from these different civilisations with wine. You mentioned that spread to different parts of the Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, which we're going to get to. We've had a look at that kind of material. Now, let's have a look at the origin area for wine production. Now, do scholars believe that wine production begins at roughly the same time at several different places in the world? Or is there one area that is normally seen as

this is the focal heart of wine production? So, this is something that's very much up for debate in scholarship. And while our evidence does point to there being one origin point or one origin region, let's say, for wine, it's something that often gets twisted and bent, not just by kind of archaeologists and historians, but also by modern winemakers and people in the industry today, because there's quite a lot of importance that modern countries and regions give to wine, and they all want a piece of the kind of origin story. So this is something that's kind of really hotly debated. In terms of the evidence we have at the moment, it shows currently that the earliest origin focal point we have for wine is in this Georgian, Transcaucasian region, or between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea. And one of the best

known pieces of evidence for this is Shulavaris Gora, which is just south of Tbilisi in Georgia, modern Georgia today. And there we've got pieces of ceramics which have been tested using organic residue analysis to try and detect these chemical signatures for residues. And these pieces of ceramics date to 6,000 BCE, so we're thinking 8,000 years ago. And they came back positive for traces of wine. And one of the key indicators was tartaric acid, which is what a lot of these residue tests look for as a key indicator of wine. So we've got there at this site, Chula Verescora, indications that wine of some sort was present. It was in these ceramic jars. What we don't have is any evidence of production necessarily.

So we've got the presence of wine, but not necessarily clear signs of where it was produced. Of course, it was produced somewhere, somehow, because the wine's there. But we don't quite understand how at that extremely early point in time, 8,000 years ago. And 8,000 years ago in that region, is this the time of the Neolithic, of early farming? Is this the context as to why you do see evidence of wine, but not the production at that time? It is. It's deeply interwoven with early cultural trajectories. And we're seeing what's often been termed this emergence of civilization, as awful as a term that is to use today. And there's a lot of really good work that's been done using cutting edge scientific

techniques around the whole Mediterranean, looking at the various crops that were intertwined with the emergence of agriculture and how that affected the movement of people. And it looks very much like viticulture was one of those central crops in how people were becoming more sedentary and societies were emerging in discrete areas. And it also is quite interesting to think about the dietary role that it would have played in cultures at this time and in societies at this time. Not all these Neolithic people groups were making wine, as far as we know, only those in places like this kind of Georgian, Iranian, Armenian region, as far as we can tell today. There's evidence emerging in Greece too, which we'll get to in a second. But it's interesting to think about the

potential advantage that these groups might have had in terms of the antimicrobial properties of wine or the health benefits of wine that we know today. Perhaps these groups that discovered wine production or were experimenting with wine production and were starting to use wine as a drink and as a nutritional component of their diet, perhaps they enjoyed some sort of dietary advantage over other Neolithic people groups that weren't necessarily doing that. So there's all kinds of interesting aspects that you can start to look at in this very early period of expansion of agriculture and through this Neolithic emergence that we see here. And to repeat, that was 8,000 years ago. You have evidence that far back. It's insane. But you did highlight how, although you have these tantalizing bits of information there from Georgia, you don't

have evidence of wine production or that hasn't been found yet. So what is some of our earliest evidence of actual wine production that we know of? So we start to get hints not too far after this. We have the site of Hadjifruz, which is in Iran, not too far away. And at Hadjifruz, which is only 500 years or so later than Shulaveris Gora, we've got fragments of larger ceramic vessels, also with positive chemical indicators for the presence of wine. Also, interestingly enough, indicators for the presence of resin in these same containers. So we might be seeing hajifruas, an extremely early precursor to the Greek and Roman habit of using pitch on their wine vessels to waterproof them and accidentally or serendipitously acting as a preservative or an antioxidant, which was really important for

resin or pitch in these vessels. And we've got this, as I said, back at hajifruas, 5,500 BCE. So extremely early on. And we've also got perhaps as I said, back at Hadjifruz, 5,500 BCE, so extremely early on. And we've also got perhaps the better known site of Arani I in Armenia, modern Armenia, which gives us even more convincing evidence of production rather than just the presence of wine. It's in a cave. It's got huge ceramic vats or jars that were buried in the ground with traces of wine in them. But also in the same context, we've got evidence of grape pips and grape skins that have been pressed and desiccated grapevine wood. So we're starting to marry up lots of different types of evidence

at these slightly later sites. The Orani one is 4,000 BCE, so we're already 2,000 years later than Shulavaris Gora, our earliest evidence. But we're starting to marry up better evidence for production facilities inside these caves rather than just the presence of wine. Were they used almost as natural refrigerators to try and keep the wine cool? Is that what we're thinking that they were used for? Obviously, we don't know conclusively, but what the most logical conclusion is, is that the people recognise that these caves had very

stable and cool microclimates, which was really beneficial for the production and storage of wine, much in the same manner as we see in the Roman period with their large cellars and their subterranean dolia or big ceramic jars that they used to keep the wine cool as it's fermenting and in a stable environment. These Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures were probably using caves in much the same way. Another interesting component is that caves are quite easy to keep secure and quite easy to protect. And again, we can look at comparisons for Greek or Roman storage structures, which often have one entrance so that they can be easily defendable. We've got lots of examples from Ostia, for example.

And these caves perhaps also had a security aspect to them as well, with one entrance in and out and also the nice, cool climate inside. nice, cool climate inside. So there's lots of different ways, I think, that these very, very early facilities like a Rennie 1 are drawing parallels and are kind of acting as precursors to much later ancient wine production. I'm just picturing in my mind the geography of this time. So we've got a Rennie 1 in Armenia. We've got that very early site from Georgia that I'm not going to attempt to repeat because I can't quite say it. And we've also got Haji Farooz in Iran. So that seems almost like a triangle for early wine production. I mean, Mesopotamia is obviously in that area too, and you mentioned that earlier myth.

Do we also find evidence of early wine production in Mesopotamia too? We do. We definitely do. We don't have anything. I mean, sites like Haji Farooz in Iran are really in that kind of Mesopotamian region or right on the border of it. So we do have glimpses of very early production there. We don't have a lot of widespread evidence in Mesopotamia. So again, it's starting to seem like wine was emerging just to the north of Mesopotamia and then potentially spreading south and east as it kind of expanded, as it became more common. But we do have evidence in Mesopotamia not long after.

We've got the site of Godentepe, which is a very well-known site in Mesopotamia, a settlement site. It's at 2,000 meters above sea level. So interestingly, quite high up in terms of where we usually think of grapevines being cultivated and doing quite well. It also has grapevines still growing across the landscape today. So in terms of landscape change over 5,000 years, perhaps not much has changed necessarily. But Godenteper gave us some really nice early Mesopotamian evidence from about 3,500 BCE to 3,000 BCE, where excavators discovered two different phases of wine production, perhaps. The earliest one isn't as convincing. It's kind of wine residues in ceramic containers, again, as we had at some of the earlier sites. But the second phase,

which is from about 3000 BCE and was discovered in what's been interpreted as a private elite structure or some sort of elite residence, had more convincing evidence of production. They found a mud brick or clay basin where grapes were potentially crushed or trodden in. They found some big funnels with lids that you could potentially squash grapes down through to get the juice out of them. And then they also married all this up with some nice chemical dye for the presence of wine in a lot of this material too. What's most interesting at this site is that we're getting this sense of elite control or interconnection with this early Mesopotamian wine production, which is quite different to some of our other very early sites like Diklitas in northern Greece, which doesn't appear to have any kind of elite interconnection. So we're starting perhaps to see the emergence of different types of wine production in different parts of the Mediterranean world or the kind of Eastern Mediterranean world at this time, where some are starting to become

more interconnected into the elite space and the elite world, perhaps as an economic activity. Others are forming more of a subsistence or a core dietary activity in non-elite strata. If this is quite a valuable commodity, if this is a status symbol for these elites, can we imagine that maybe through the rivers or overland or via the Caspian Sea and so on, that wine was being traded between these various parts of the Near East and these uplands to Mesopotamia, you know, back in Neolithic times? We can theoretically think about these things. I don't think there's too much clear evidence of wine as a commodity in the Neolithic period moving around. I don't know that we can be as clear cut about it as that. What we do start to

see, especially through the later period of the Neolithic, through the Catholic and especially into the Bronze Age, is the sharing of all these different artifacts and vessels associated with wine culture. And a lot of the well-known material is things like goblets and drinking cups and other kind of accoutre especially into the Bronze Age and being shared across cultures. There's an awful lot of interconnection happening across these cultures, even from the Neolithic, but especially onwards from there. So we do see these connections being made. We can certainly think about knowledge of wine production and cultivars being shared across this landscape. And that only increases through time as we work through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. A bit of a fun tangent, but I want to ask it regardless. Obviously, you've got this evidence for early wine production, some really interesting evidence it sounds like. Do we have any idea from what survived, from the residues and so on? Now, you don't need to give

exact percentages, but do we have any rough idea how alcoholic these early wines were? Were they stronger than wines today? We can be pretty confident in saying they certainly weren't stronger than wines today. They weren't? They weren't. It's really difficult to produce a high alcoholic wine using only ancient techniques, using natural fermentation, using the wild yeast that you have on the grapes. Today, of course, winemakers often select specific yeasts to put in the kind of fermentation process and they're very deliberate and specific in terms of the environment that they're using, they're controlling to create their wine. Back then, especially in the Neolithic period, almost none of that would have happened. They used caves as best they could to keep these

kind of cool environments, which would have helped fermentation. But by far and large, you're relying on luck. You're relying on the fact that you've got some good yeast strains on the skins of your grapes. You're relying on the fact that the fermentation goes as planned, something doesn't go wrong and it doesn't spoil. So an enormous amount of the wine from the Neolithic, even through into the Greek and Roman periods, would have been low alcohol. It would have been pretty awful. It would have spoiled very easily and not kept for very long. And then of course, by the time we get to classical era, they're watering down their wines a lot of the time. So what they're drinking probably wouldn't have been very high in alcohol.

There was no knowledge of distillation. And it's only with distillation and fortifying your wines that you start getting into those really high alcohol levels. So we can be pretty confident in saying the best they would have been able to do is what we consider a kind of normal wine, your 12% to 15% in alcohol. It would have been extremely difficult for them to produce anything above that. That was completely contrary to what I thought, what I was expecting to hear, that the ancients actually had less strong wine than we usually do today. I did not expect that at all. If we keep on Mesopotamia a bit longer before we look at other regions where wine spreads to, because there is so much of the world we could have a look at in regards to spreading, but I kind of want to focus on the Near East and the Mediterranean. But how important is Mesopotamia also in the spreading of wine to communities further east,

into Central Asia and beyond? It's certainly one of those crossroad regions that we see. We've got early wine emerging in Georgia and Armenia, we've got some evidence quite early from Mesopotamia. And then we've got it moving through this Mesopotamian region down into the Levant and into Egypt and perhaps further east and across over to Greece. So the Mesopotamia really turns into an important crossroads, an important region for the early gestation of wine, not just as a product and its production, but also as a culture in terms of where you're drinking it, how you're drinking it and what it's being used for. It turns into a really important area. And we start to get glimpses of this from an early time, and especially through

the Bronze Age, through the documentation and literary sources that we have at Mesopotamia, which we, of course, don't have in these Neolithic periods. We've got the very famous clay tablets with writing on them, some of which talk about gardens of vines. One of them talks about a four hectare garden of vines at an old Mesopotamian site. Another one talks of different types of wine, good quality wine, second rate quality wine, red wine. So we're also starting to see in Mesopotamia emergence of diverse wine types, diverse wine qualities and recognition of this. And perhaps most interesting is from a North Syrian site called Ebla, where an enormous quantity of these tablets has been found, 17,000 or something, huge numbers of them. And a lot of these talk about wine, but also wine equipment.

So they talk about presses in people's villages and cellars in different villages. So we're seeing production becoming intertwined with village life at this time. This is 2300 BC, so quite early on in the Bronze Age. And another talks about people's roles in this wine culture in terms of production and trade and consumption. And in one of the tablets or across this archive of tablets, eight people are given the title of wine man. So we're seeing this specific job, as it were, of wine man emerging in this Mesopotamian North Syrian region. And what's perhaps most interesting is the repertoire of duties that this wine man has. And it extends all the way from taking in the wine for storage and for sorting and collecting and organizing, but it also extends through to the preparation and mixing for consumption.

So it's this multi-faceted role where you're both sommelier and server, but also warehouse person and logistics manager. It's an enormous remit that these wine men in Mesopotamia have. It's really become a true business, hasn't it? Or the leads commodity, but they know where the money is if these elites are seeking for it. As I said, another day we'll go further east to Central Asia and East Asia because that story of wine and places as far as China is also really interesting. But let's go westwards towards the Mediterranean. When do we start to see, particularly, I guess, in the area of the Levant, wine making its way towards the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard? So we start to get really nice evidence from the Levant, a kind of 4,000 BCE, 3,500 BCE. And what's most useful to us as archaeologists

understanding the spread and distribution of wine and viticulture more broadly is that we start to see grapevines growing in regions where they didn't occur wild. So in the Jordan Valley, where grapevines didn't grow in the wild, we start to get arqueobotanical evidence from 3,700 BCE turning up of grapevines being present there, which is great indications for us for cultivation and probably domestication too. People are purposefully growing grapevines, not just to produce wine, probably also for table grapes and raisins and stuff like that. Alongside that spread into the Levant, we start seeing it in Egypt slightly after that. And this then ties into theories of the Canaanites from the Levant being these instigators of wine culture in Egypt. Slightly after that, they're spreading their fascination

of wine as a drink and a trading product. And then we start to see it in Greece. But what's most interesting about Greece, which I'm sure we'll get to later on, is that it in fact appears earlier now, around 4,300 BCE, than it does in the Levant and Egypt. So we're starting to get better understanding of maybe it's not a in the Levant and Egypt. We're starting to get a better understanding of maybe it's not a straightforward spread of South and West. Maybe there's different spreads, West and South at the same time, or even West earlier. Or maybe there's dual innovations and experiments happening with wine production happening at once. It's not just coming from one origin point. Because my mind would immediately think of the Greek colonies in the Black Sea,

but of course, this is before those colonies are in existence. So that's not how wine is reaching there. There's so many different cultures. I mean, let's briefly talk about Egypt before we go to Anatolia and then to Greece. Because Egypt is another place where the Eurasian grapevine doesn't grow naturally. And yet, it seems as if Egyptian elites from the tombs, from the archaeology, they really, really embrace one, and they almost make it their own. This is almost an emphasis, once again, on the great power of

ancient Egypt, that they think, oh, I like that, and now I'm going to keep it for the elites. Right. It's much the same as we see with Mesopotamia. We've got this fascination with places like Egypt and Mesopotamia being beer-drinking cultures, and beer was their main product. And it certainly was. Beer was very much ingrained across society. It was very much the everyday drink. But wine held a really important place in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. And it's often underestimated, I think, and has only started to be truly understood in the last couple of decades. You're absolutely right that we have fantastic early artistic evidence from Egypt. From about 2500 BCE, we start seeing scenes of wine production, scenes of cultivating and picking and harvesting grapes

emerging in the elite tombs, beautiful iconographical displays of all of these activities going on. And this only continues through the middle and into the new kingdoms. We start to see evidence of wine being present in Egypt even earlier. So from about 3000 BCE, we've got tombs of the first dynasty where huge quantities of amphora, these clay jars with wine, have been discovered, still sealed, still intact in these tomb complexes. What's most interesting is that they're not locally produced. They're not locally made. So we're starting to see some introduction of wine from the Canaanite region, from this Levantine region. We can trace the amphorae made there based on their fabric

analysis. And then shortly after that, we start to see wine become much more widespread in the iconography. So it seems that the old theory is still holding up in terms of wine being introduced from the north, from the eastern Mediterranean down into Egypt, and then it taking off as a bit of a local industry after that. Once again, interesting how it's an elite commodity and then gets more and more important there. Could more and more Egyptians get access to wine as time went on? Is that a belief? Do we know anything about that at all? Much in the same as Mesopotamia. Again, it seems that it stayed as a bit of an elite and luxury item all the way through most of dynastic Egypt, perhaps changing in the New Kingdom,

where it's becoming a bit more widespread. But throughout the dynastic period, it certainly seems to be more of an elite kind of item for consumption, but also very much an elite controlled industry. We think, in fact, that the pharaoh and the royal family owned and controlled almost all of the vineyards and all of the wine production in Egypt. That's certainly not the rule. There are instances where other high status individuals owned vineyards or were involved in production, but the majority seem to be controlled by the royal family in Egypt. And we start as well to see it becoming a much more elite consumption, an elite drink. We hear about it every now and then being given to soldiers on campaign or as payments or things like that. But by and large, seems to be more of an elite beverage, whereas beer was reserved for the everyday person and the everyday drink. There definitely seems to be a differentiation

between the two. Well, let's keep heading west because you mentioned it a couple of times. We'll get now to the Greek world. So what is this story? The ever-evolving story, slightly complicated story I'm guessing as well, of how wine reaches the Greek world. So the contradiction is between the traditionally supported narrative, which is that it slowly moved westward. It had this origin point in the Georgian-Armenian-Iranian region, moved south and moved west. The difficulty now is that earlier evidence is slowly starting to emerge in Greece. And while it's not as early as the origin evidence that we talked about before, it is pushing back further and further and further as our archaeological techniques are improving. So a fantastic site to understand this through is Dikilitas, which is up in northern Greece. And from context data to 4,300 BCE there, so very early on, well before the Bronze Age, we have both a storage jar as well as a serving jug, which both chemically show the

presence of wine inside them. The storage jar as well has resin. So again, we're seeing this use of resin to either coat jars or preserve the wine serendipitously. And we also have 5,000 grape pips that have been found at this site. So a huge quantity of grapes that were being used or processed, as well as pressed grape skins and seeds and stalks and all the kind of other things that go along with wine production and we find in the archipelagical record. So we're seeing perhaps equipment and infrastructure in the production of wine and also the serving of wine in terms of this jug that was found with residues of wine. And we also see evidence of vine management elsewhere at another site in northern Greece

called Makri from around the same period has evidence of pruning grapevines, and we're seeing the residues of that. So we're starting to get better evidence earlier on in Greece. It's not necessarily supporting the traditional theory that viticulture and wine production was this emergence with the palatial cultures of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans. We're definitely seeing it much earlier than that, even millennia earlier than that at the moment. So if we do talk about the Minoans and the palatial culture of the Bronze Age, with this new evidence, does it almost seem as if the production of wine in Greece, on the mainland and in the Cyclades and on the islands, it's been there for centuries by that time? And that could partially explain why, by the time of the Minoans,

that wine becomes so prominent and also quite widespread too. Yeah, it's certainly a possibility. There was some sort of local exploitation and local knowledge already present there, which then combined with this huge impetus of viticultural and wine culture from the East and from the Southeast, from Egypt, to build into these Bronze Age palatial societies, the Mycenaeans and Minoans, a really important wine culture that was obviously a big part of their society. And then this obviously gets taken to a whole nother level once we get to the archaic and the classical period in Greece and then in Rome. I think what we can say is that there's certainly local presence, and we're starting to see this in places like Italy too, where there's

evidence emerging for some sort of local existence of viticulture and wine production, which then gets emphasised more as new cultures from elsewhere come into contact and bring their own wine cultures with them, and it kind of explodes. So is that another part of the traditional view that, let's say, it comes from the East, spreads to the Greek world in the Bronze Age time, and then the Greeks will then almost pick up the torch and spread wine even further to the west to Italy and then ultimately places like France and the Gauls. Is that another part that this new evidence is starting to suggest? Well, hold on, maybe that's not the case. Does it also open the possibility that wine production does start to

emerge in different parts of the Mediterranean world almost independently of each other? It's certainly possible. We don't have enough evidence at the moment to definitively say it's emerging independently of each other. It all seems interlinked at the moment. But what's kind of fine-tuning our understanding is the fact that there's certainly local activity that's happening. It's not just relying on overseas or infra-regional expertise being delivered to these regions. It's more of a kind of fusion of the two. There's a local and external influence creating these enormous wine cultures that we see later. All right. Well, let's go back to the Bronze Age. I would like to talk about the Minoans in a bit more detail because we've talked about the

Mesopotamian. We've talked about Bronze Age Egypt. We've got to talk about the Minoans in some detail. What do we know about wine, its importance, how it is used in Minoan society? It's certainly a crucial part of the agricultural landscape. It's a crucial part of the economic landscape. Again, as with Mesopotamia, we have Linear B tablets. So we've got documentary sources talking about vineyards, talking about the administration behind moving wine around between regions, between palace and festival and so on. For example, at Pylos, there's tablets talking about cultivating grapevines up trees. And we think that they were in fact quite fond of cultivating grapevines up fig trees in the landscape, as well as

intercropping grapevines with cereals, which again is really nice evidence for setting the stage of what comes 1,000 years later, 2,000 years later with Greece and classical Greek and Roman cultures, where they favoured polyculture over a monoculture. So we're starting to see glimpses of what the landscape would have looked like, how this kind of viticultural world worked. And at the same time, we start to get glimpses of the economy and the trade behind it. Other tablets from Pylos talk about distributing 11,000 litres of wine to nine different localities for festivals. Tablets from Knossos talk about producing 140 hectolitres of wine. We're starting to see viticulture and winemaking emerge in a big way, on a big scale, and permeating culture and society in much the

same way as we do in Mesopotamia and Egypt and these Levantine regions. Because you have those amazing writers, those drinking vessels, which are shaped like animals. There's the bull writer. I remember doing it for A-level at school. I come in, Mr. Balfour, kill me for saying that. And they are just so elaborate. And the amount of time and effort gone into creating those animal figurines that are used for pouring wine. Sometimes they're made of silver. It emphasises that real status symbol of wine that endures with the Minoans and the Mycenaeans on the mainland of Greece. Yeah, absolutely. The drinking paraphernalia that we get around this wine culture from the Bronze Age onwards is really crucial to our understanding of what's going on.

There's the writer, of course. There's all these amazing cups and drinking vessels. our understanding of what's going on. There's the writer, of course, there's all these amazing cups and drinking vessels. There's also things like sieves and strainers, which are key in our understanding of how wine was prepared before it was consumed. Obviously, when you're making wine in antiquity, it's not going through the same filtering and clarifying process that we do today to create our nice, clear, drinkable immediately wines. It would have had a lot of gunk and muck in it back then. It would have had seeds and residues in it. So they used these strainers to filter and clarify their wine before they drunk it. And then a lot of these strainers end up being made out of valuable metal, silver, and so on, and end up in funerary contexts, which we then discover later on. So strainers and implements

like that play a big part in understanding how wine was being drunk and also the transmission of wine cultures, because we then start seeing them emerge in Italy, in the Greek colonies there, and so on. So we start seeing these drinking equipment emerge perhaps just before wine production emerges at scale in new areas. So we're seeing wine cultures being pushed out and then local production happening just after. That's such a great point also to highlight there. You mentioned it in passing, which is wine in funerary context in these great elite contexts and we're looking at the residue i remember interviewing um brian rose some time ago about king midas and gordian and like the last feast in the tomb of midas or his father gordius and they were able to figure

out the type of wine that they drank at the fun. That is another thing, isn't it? Wine for elites, but also it becomes so closely associated with ritual and religion in Anatolia, but also I'm guessing in Greece too at this time. Yeah, absolutely. Emerging everywhere in terms of interconnection with religion. If we duck back to Egypt for a second, there's a god of the wine press in ancient Egypt called Kesmu, who we hear about crushing pharaoh's enemies like the grapes in the press and extracting juice like the blood of enemies. There's this wonderful kind of evocative violent story around Khizmu in ancient Egypt, who's the god of the wine press. And the same thing, as you said, emerges through the Aegean and classical Greece too. And funerary

assemblages, as you said, absolutely crucial to not just understanding consumption and the spread of wine, but even understanding production. Because in the Aegean, in these Minoan tombs, and over in Cyprus as well, there are examples, we have seals depicting scenes of wine production, which then marry up really nicely with the archaeology. There's a fantastic example from Crete, which shows a man stomping on grapes in a ceramic tub. And the best evidence we have for Minoan-era wine production facilities in Crete are these ceramic tubs. So we've got really nice alignment between the artistic source and the archaeological material between these ceramic tubs with spouts that people would have trodden the grapes in and what we see in the art. That's incredible.

That archaeology to learn more about the wine production itself. I mean, that blows you away. It really does. I guess one other part of that wine production I'd like to ask about before we completely wrap up is we've talked all about being a status symbol and being used by the elites. Vineyards in Greece, in the Greek world, Minoans, Mycenaeans, but maybe even into the early Iron Age and the Archaic period. Do we see everyday farmers being able to create vineyards at this time, or is it still very much almost monopolised by the elite? Without a doubt, there would have been involvement from everyday people, whether they had the capital, the economic capital or social

capital, to own the vineyards, to own the land, to grow them, and then to own the facilities where wine was produced in these early periods is difficult to say. There's not much evidence from the Aegean, from the Minoan, the Mycenaean worlds, from Egypt, and also from Mesopotamia for non-elite involvement in wine production. It's not really until we get to the archaic, the classical periods and on that we start to see the kind of everyday person involved in viticulture and viniculture. So it very much seems to be an elite controlled activity. What I will say, though, is that we need to keep bias in mind. It's really difficult archaeologically and through the literature to see the everyday people and to discern what they were doing. They could well

have been making wine using really kind of rudimentary equipment that has long decomposed and we don't have any evidence for. They might not have been able to afford to put up the permanent stone built infrastructure that we see in the bigger facilities. So it could not have been able to afford to put up the permanent stone-built infrastructure that we see in the bigger facilities. So it could well have been happening, and we just don't have evidence of it yet. So again, our understanding may change in future. But at the moment, it very much seems an elite-controlled activity. Well, Emeline, it's been fascinating to explore all of this. And I must say, over more than 6,000, 7,000 years that the story of wine seems to go back to. The spread,

the popularity of wine, it has only ever increased since then, hasn't it? It's a story that's ever evolving. And just exploring its ancient history is worthy of several podcasts because it is just such a massive story. It's true. It's true. It's fascinating to think about the story of wine as well because, yes, it certainly has increased in importance and popularity in many parts of the world. We've seen wine production taken off on a huge scale in places like Australia and the Americas. nutrition, religion, and economy through the Greek and Roman worlds, for example, it'd be hard-pressed to say that it's become more important and more popular in those contexts. It kind of depends, I think, on your geographical and cultural context as to how important or popular wine might have become since antiquity. In many parts of antiquity, I think wine was even more important than it is today. It's just like the origins of olivar when we did that discussion, how important it is to all of these civilizations, their growth and their trade and their evolution.

I mean, Emlyn, you've also, of course, you've got a copy of this lovely book here, Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology, Scientific Approaches in Roman Context. So, your research is ever ongoing in this field? Absolutely. As we said, there's new techniques emerging all the time, things like ancient DNA, ancient chemical residue analysis, which are only improving our ability to see ancient winemaking and ancient wine consumption. So it's only going to be an evolving and continuing story from here. We're certainly not stuck in one way of understanding the ancient wine world. Well, fantastic. Best of luck with that, my friend. Keep in touch. And it just goes to me to say, thank you so much from this wonderful studio for coming back on the podcast my pleasure it's been fantastic

well there you go there was dr emlyn dodd talking you through the origins of wine the emergence of wine making todd that episode was for you i hope you you enjoyed it. Now, last things from me. If you have a suggestion for an episode, well, get in touch. You can email us. We'll put a link in the description and you can let us know what you'd like to see us cover on the Ancients in the future. We'll add it to the ever-growing list. And also, wherever you're listening to the Ancients podcast, whether it be on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, podcast, whether it be on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, make sure that you click the follow button that you are subscribed so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice

every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.