Greek wine, not so Greek after all

The consumption of wine was widespread throughout antiquity and not only by the Greeks - or Macedonians! I just learned that a DNA study searching for the place where the wild grape was domesticated for the first time has been undertaken.

Botanists collected samples from grapevines all over the Near East, i.e., southeastern Anatolia (roughly today’s Turkey), Armenia and Georgia. They also analyzed the residues from wine jars thousands of years old. I am not familiar with chemical techniques, but as I understand from this article published by Phys.Org, they looked for significant amounts of tartaric acid, which by the way, was only available from grapes in antiquity.

 

Armed with their results from ancient winemakers in Georgia, Armenia and Iran cross-checked with the traces in old clay vessels, the researchers were able to place the first domesticated Eurasian grape in southeastern Anatolia point between 8,500 and 5,000 BC. Southeast Anatolia is part of the Fertile Crescent, where our civilization is claimed to be born. This is generally the area between Euphrates and Tigris called Mesopotamia in today’s Iran and Iraq and comprises southeastern Turkey, the Levant, down to ancient Egypt. This crescent is widely accepted as being the birthplace of the world’s first known domesticated plants. 

Thanks to DNA research, botanists were able to isolate 13 so-called founder grapes by running through a family tree of European grapes. This ancestor grape is called “vitis vinifera,” and the very theory cancels the idea that most Western European grapes supposedly came independently from various places in the Middle or Near East or Egypt, Greece, or Turkey. 

It is pretty interesting to learn that wild grapevines still grow in gullies and washes somewhere between the Turkish cities of Elazig and Diyarbakir. Specialists call it an actual pilgrimage to genetically 8,000-9,000-year old vines! It seems like finding the mother of all grapevines! 

Unfortunately, these ancestral wonders are endangered by a virus called phylloxera, which in the late 19th century annihilated so many vineyards all over Europe. It seems that wild wines are somewhat protected by their ecosystem, while cultivated varieties are highly vulnerable. Because of that, experts fear the worst for the Kurdish Diyarbakir region, where we may lose a unique genetic diversity. A remedy is to graft vines onto disease-resistant rootstock. Still, this procedure is being rejected by the local population, and eventually, the Turkish wine industry is doomed to suffer the consequences.

It is quite dramatic to realize that these precious grapevines that have survived so many centuries and even millennia might soon disappear forever.