The First Grapes, and Tasting the Past
I am lost in this city and can no longer find the Winehouse door.
Please help me to find that street again where Love resides.
—Hafiz, “River of Wine,” ca. 1350
Nine years had passed since my hotel room taste of Cremisan wine. It was mid-January. I was in Massachusetts to speak at Harvard about a different topic, and on that drizzly and chilly day I wasn’t thinking about the origins of grapes or delicious, little-known bottles of wine. I met a group of friends for dinner at Oleana, a Middle Eastern restaurant run by chef Ana Sortun, who has won numerous accolades for her subtle yet startlingly flavorful cooking, including a James Beard Award.
The wine list included a bottle of Greek Argyros Assyrtiko, and I pushed our table to try it, keeping my fingers crossed. There were safer choices, and one never knows how people will respond to something new. But everyone loved the bracingly crisp white, which perfectly complimented the lamb and grape leaf tart, celery root dumplings, and other dishes. I was happy to see diversity in the wine by the glass list, too: Vermentino and Cortese whites from Italy, a Hungarian Furmint, and then the reds: a Touriga from Portugal, a Refosco-Mavrodaphne from Greece, a Perricone, a Raboso blend, and an Italian Freisa.
I had a little time before flying home the next day and stopped at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, not caring or checking what exhibits were up. It’s a small museum with top-notch holdings, a reliable way to spend a pleasurable hour or two. I wandered into a room with some of the best painted Greek and Roman wine vessels I’d ever seen. There was a large krater, or wine container, from circa 500 BC decorated with a procession of bearded men; they traipsed around, carrying amphoras, making music, riding horses, talking to one another. A plate from 480 BC featured a woman playing a drinking game called kottabos, which called for flinging the dregs from your bowl of wine at a target. I could see the attraction.
One drinking cup depicted a bare-breasted young woman with what looked like castanets; another had an old woman welcoming an old man—or perhaps telling him to stuff it. A large water jar featured Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, surrounded by a fantastical entourage: a beautiful young woman petting a panther, a bearded satyr, a winged boy flying through the air casting some sort of spell, reclining ladies, and swirling floral motifs on the reverse side. Perhaps they represented vines.
All the rituals and places I’d visited in the Mediterranean were coming to life again, including observations on human nature that are still eerily relevant. One of the gallery cases mentioned a play the Greek poet Eubulus wrote in the fourth century BC, in which Dionysus describes the stages of a drinking party:
Three bowls of wine only do I mix for the sensible: one is dedicated to health (and they drink it first), the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep—when this is drunk up wise guests go home. The fourth krater is ours no longer but belongs to hybris (outrage), the fifth to arguments, the sixth to drunken revel, the seventh to black eyes, the eighth is the bailiff’s, the ninth belongs to bitter anger, and the tenth to madness that makes people throw things.
Statues followed the wine vessels as I wandered through the museum. A nude of Aphrodite adjusting her sandal, from the first or second century AD; a Roman head of a nymph or hermaphrodite, with a short curly hairdo almost like a flapper; a bronze of Aphrodite holding a dove, from the fifth century BC. They all reminded me of her temple on Cyprus, and those island wines. Two circular busts showed wealthy traders from Mari, the ancient wine-trading city along the Tigris River. Their neatly coiffed hair and stern, self-satisfied gazes had exactly the same look you see in paintings of nineteenth century French bourgeoisie. Prosperous, and proud of it.
My wine travels had changed the way I viewed history. I first visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when I was nine or ten years old, and many others followed: Paris, London, Tel Aviv, and so on. Yet for all those years I never really saw the people in the ancient stories. They were there, but kind of like elaborate cut-outs.
The museum visit reminded me of a recent New Yorker article about star chef Yotam Ottolenghi and a special dinner he gave at the Met featuring Middle Eastern recipes from the medieval era. You may remember it was his sommelier who suggested that José Vouillamoz and his colleagues take note of the Cremisan wine. It turns out that when Ottolenghi was a child, his father took him to the monastery for a memorable tour of the winery.
I reached out to him and asked for a chef’s view of the native grapes. Why do they matter, from Cremisan or anyone else? “Well, of course, native grapes are extremely important to preserve because they ensure that we keep enjoying varieties that evolved over millennia,” he replied in an email. “Streamlining the production of all crops has been gradually robbing us of diversity of flavour and homogenized our eating and drinking experiences. My very unscientific opinion is that wines made with crops that evolved over time in a particular setting are more interesting, more complex and make much more sense when served with the local food.”
In fact, his opinion melded perfectly with those of scientists who have explored the same subject: save rare grapes, enjoy their unique flavors, and you get a biodiversity bonus, too. When grape varieties go extinct we lose those tastes and who knows what else.
Let me confess something. When I set out on all these travels I wasn’t sure what I would learn. I’d imagined something about ancient wine, but a part of me debated if the quest had a legitimate purpose. I could have taken sommelier classes instead.
Let me confess something else. Just as I ignored the wine history of my own mother’s house in Indiana, I had a scientific blind spot, too. I neglected the man who discovered the world’s oldest fossil from the grape family. Oh, I read the research paper, don’t get me wrong. But I didn’t make the mere four-hour drive from my home to visit Steven Manchester, a paleobotanist (aka a scientist who studies plant fossils) and professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Perhaps my tardiness fit a pattern of roundaboutness. My Cremisan wine obsession started by accident, and I spent years searching for answers. So I finally visited Manchester, whether late or right on time. Seeing his office, I liked him right away. It was small. The desk was crowded. A coffeepot on one side looked as if it could hold fresh brew or weeks-old dregs. The carpet and filing cabinets were kind of worn, but that didn’t matter. Manchester focused on his work.
He said grape paleobotany was really in a mess twenty years ago, because scientists didn’t completely understand the relationship between modern species and the fossil record. For example, DNA research indicated Vitis might have first emerged eighty or ninety million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The early grapes split off from the poplar family. Yet the oldest fossils anyone had found—in both southern England and North America—were about fifty million years old. “It seemed odd that we weren’t finding fossils as old as we thought we should for the grape family,” he told me. Manchester decided everyone might be looking too much in the northern hemisphere, so he sought grant funding for a dig in India. “There were two surprises. One is that [the trip] was funded, and secondly, we actually did find grapes. The molecular evidence is telling us we need to look more in places like India, Africa, Australia, and older rocks,” he said.
India was an island sixty-five million years ago, located down near today’s equator. An enormous asteroid had hit Earth about a million years before, throwing up megatons of dust and debris that severely reduced sunlight. Many plants died out, then the plant-eating dinosaurs died, and so on. Volcanoes probably helped drive the mass extinctions, too. In India a long range of them were erupting regularly around the same time the asteroid hit, adding even more soot to the air.
“There were huge lava flows coming out. The plants were colonizing those beds, or the soils that develop between those lava flows, which probably wasn’t very good for drainage or for some of the nutrients that they needed. So the trees that we’re finding petrified there are all small. We’re not finding huge ones,” Manchester said.
I asked if it was easy to identify fossil grape seeds. “Oh yeah,” he said, opening a book and showing me pictures. “So we look for that pair of infolds on one side, and if you turn it over there’s either a circular depression or an elongated groove.” I wondered what purpose the distinctive markings served, in evolutionary terms.
“We don’t know! It probably increases the surface area [of the seed],” he said passionately, then paused. “Maybe you know what those extra infolds would do?” he asked. I’m pretty sure he was joking, but his tone was inquisitive, mixed with hope, doubt, and wonder. Anyway, I didn’t know.
Manchester’s team eventually found sixty-six-million-year-old grape fossils at the India dig, which is fifteen million years older than anything previously found. They aren’t exactly Vitis vinifera—more like a close cousin. Forty-five to fifty million years ago there was more grape diversity in the world than there is today, as we’ve lost many species over time, Manchester told me.
I mentioned the widely accepted theory that grapes originally developed flavors to attract animals and birds, so they would eat the seeds and spread them. He suggested it’s not that simple, since some of the oldest grapes had nasty, almost trickster-like fruits. A forty-seven-million-year-old fossil had a big quarter-inch seed, with just a millimeter of fruit covering. “Probably wouldn’t have been a favorite pick for human domestication,” he speculated, and perhaps not even for birds. That could explain the origins of the less-than-appealing flavors of some wild American grapes, I thought. “Some of them have pretty bad raphide crystals in them, probably to dissuade critters from eating them,” he added. Raphides are hard, needle-like, naturally occurring deposits found in the cells of some plants.
We talked for a few minutes more, and Manchester offered to show me the oldest grape fossil in the world. In another room filled with boxes and equipment he pulled out a small, clear envelope, and there it was. The thumbnail-sized fossil was encased in black, shiny basalt from the primordial lava flows, and the seed was immediately recognizable, even to me. I took some pictures and asked to hold it. Manchester let me.
I felt a chill or a thrill run up my spine. The little vines must have been real fighters, I thought. Lousy soil, fetid air, and all sorts of hungry creatures trying to eat them. Such a long road to even reach the era about eight thousand or so years ago, when humans figured out how to make wine. It was funny that I’d pegged the six-thousand-year-old Armenian cave winery that Vouillamoz told me about as old, when of course it isn’t, geologically speaking.
I still think about Cremisan sometimes, and where those varieties fit on the great wine grape family tree. Now I may even have a reputation among wine scientists as the guy who knows something about Cremisan. Not long after the museum visit, Patrick McGovern sent me an email asking if Shivi Drori had published his paper yet. Now let’s be clear: McGovern, the world’s greatest expert on ancient wine, didn’t actually ask my opinion. But I confess to kind of feeling like I had arrived.
In early 2017 Drori’s team published its research on Holy Land grapes in the journal Nature. They confirmed that some of the Cremisan grapes date to the Roman era, documented numerous previously unknown varieties all across Israel, and gave the most detailed picture yet of wine grapes in the region. Drori found genetic links between the Israeli/Palestinian grapes and others in the Caucasus, Iran, and Central Asia. To me the DNA results reinforced previous research and thousands of years of poetry, supporting the theory that humans traded grapes all over the region, seeking better flavors for eating or for wine. Some grapes from the Central Asian sativa grape subspecies also have the potential to make fine wine, according to the research, and in retrospect that makes sense. Europeans manufactured the idea that only certain grapes make fine wine. It now seems likely that the first winemakers, from the Caucasus down to the Holy Land, used other grape varieties, too.
Drori’s research creates a foundation for a rebirth of native, ancient, Middle Eastern wines, so you may someday find bottles of Ein-Misla, Sorek, Nitzan, and Yael wine. We’ll see if Israeli consumers are ready for a change. I hope so—I want to taste all those new, old varieties. But Drori didn’t prove that winemaking originated in the Levant, as he’d hoped. In fact, Patrick McGovern and a group of scientists found even more evidence for the Caucasus region, with a 2017 paper about a large jar decorated with grape clusters that was used near Tbilisi eight thousand years ago.
Last I heard, José Vouillamoz had identified a previously unknown grape found only in Lebanon. He never said that deciphering the entire family tree of wine grapes would be quick or easy. Perhaps some hidden valley in the Caucasus really is full of primordial vines, like the apple variety in Kazakhstan that scientists have identified as an early ancestor for almost all cultivated ones. Traders and travelers along the old Silk Road carried Malus sieversii seeds to the east and west, starting at least ten thousand years ago. Their horses even helped by eating the apples and pooping the seeds out later—a package of natural fertilizer. Adrian Newton, a scientist who has studied the apples, found that a single wild Kazakh M. sieversii tree can have more variation in fruit size, shape, color, and flavor than all the species of cultivated apples in Britain. They can be yellowish, purplish, bright green, or a kaleidoscope combination, and vary from plum-sized to what we consider a normal apple size. They are the apple version of what José Vouillamoz dreams of finding—a single ancient grape variety whose DNA shows a link to almost all the vineyards of the world. The “Mother” wine grape.
I haven’t seen a grape like that yet, but maybe someday. Then again, did I already taste the past with Cremisan’s wines, or Alaverdi’s?
Perhaps. Who can say?