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Archaeobiology and Ancient Wine

Beside the sea she lives, the woman of the vine, the maker of wine; Siduri sits in the garden at the edge of the sea.

—The Epic of Gilgamesh

Cremisan and Wine Grapes led me to another scientist. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Patrick McGovern is often called the Indiana Jones of ancient wine and beer. He received his undergraduate chemistry degree from Cornell and his neurochemistry PhD from the University of Rochester’s Brain Research Center. He studied Biblical Archaeology in Jerusalem, lectured on Egypt in the time of the pharaohs at Rutgers, and has done fieldwork in Jordan, Syria, Iran, Armenia, China, and many other countries.

McGovern was one of José Vouillamoz’s early mentors—in 2004 they traveled to the Middle East together to research wine grape origins. In the 1980s McGovern helped pioneer an emerging field: biomolecular archaeology. Even unbelievably faint residues (one part per million—or billion) on ancient pottery still contain chemical fingerprints of the liquids and foods they once held. Inspired by advances in radiocarbon dating and medical analysis, archaeologists and botanists use mass spectrometry and even nuclear reactors to decipher what people ate and drank thousands of years ago. “[A mass spectrometer] weighs molecules, sorts them according to weight, then counts the number of each weight,” according to Harold Wiley, a pioneer who helped expand use of the tool in the 1940s. The molecular weight can reveal the exact compound that’s present.

I sent McGovern an email about the Cremisan grapes; sadly, he didn’t have anything to offer, leaving me with yet another of the world’s leading wine experts who didn’t seem excited about what I’d come to think of as “my” grapes. But McGovern’s research was thought-­provoking. It sometimes reads like a fictional script for CSI: Ancient Alcohol, or proof of physicist Richard Feynman’s famous comment about wine’s complexity.

Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and won a Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics research—how matter and light interact. During a lecture in the 1960s he made these observations:

A poet once said, “The whole universe is in a glass of wine.” I don’t think we’ll ever know in what sense he meant that, for the poets don’t write to be understood. But it is true that if you look at a glass of wine closely enough you will see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid, the reflections in the glass, and our imagination adds the atoms. It evaporates depending on the wind and weather. The glass is a distillation of the earth’s rocks, and in its composition, as we’ve seen, the secret of the universe’s age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are in wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and products. And there in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. [. . .] If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — the physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and all—remember that nature doesn’t know it. So we should put it all back together, and not forget at last what it’s for. Let it give us one final pleasure more: drink it up and forget about it all.

Processes such as liquid chromatography (Greek word root: chroma [color] + graphia [drawing/writing]) revolutionized the study of ancient wine. It can separate a sample of just a few parts per trillion into distinct chemicals. Picture deconstructing a recipe down to the molecular level, or cleaning a tiny fleck of dried something-­or-­other from your refrigerator, and reverse-­engineering it to uncover the original food. It works because the molecules of different elements vary in weight. Liquid chromatography puts tiny samples in liquid form, where the various elements move at different speeds through a test container of solid material, thus precisely isolating the compounds for further study. Such tests helped identify the types of wine in King Tut’s tomb. Spanish researchers identified three types made from about 1500 to 1075 BC: a red, a white, “and a more elaborate red wine, called shedeh.”

One of McGovern’s projects looked at residue on five-­thousand-­year-­old Egyptian amphoras—the clay containers that carried wine, oil, fruit, and grain all over the Mediterranean—and compared them to an amphora from about AD 500. The older samples came from the tomb of one of Egypt’s first rulers, Scorpion I, which contained about seven hundred amphoras in three chambers.

The first challenge was proving what the contents were—it could have been wine, or not. However, the scientists recovered a tiny but identifiable fragment of Saccharomyces cerevisiae DNA—yeast—and tartaric acid, which is a grape biomarker. Some containers also had remains of grape seeds and of single figs sliced in half, perhaps to add sweetness or improve fermentation. The Scorpion I wine showed possible traces of coriander, wormwood, blue tansy, and pine resin, which was used as a combination flavoring/antioxidant. The chemical residue could also have come from mint, sage, or thyme.

The remains made sense when McGovern compared them to Egyptian papyrus writings about medicine, since herbs and spices served as flavorings and drugs for the ancient world. One papyrus is over a hundred pages long, and many of the thousand-­plus prescriptions were mixed with wine and beer—likely an effective way to get medicine to patients, and early evidence of homeopathy. In recent years various researchers in the Middle East and throughout the Mediterranean have found evidence for a wide range of ancient wine flavorings: frankincense, myrrh, cumin, dill, fennel, aloe, and balm. At another Egyptian site dating to about AD 400, amphoras were scattered around Nubian-­era taverns like kegs at a biker bar, suggesting wine had become a drink for commoners. Some of the people were buried nearby with amphoras, too. The typical size held thirty or forty gallons.

Amphoras are found all over the Mediterranean, and one huge Egyptian dumping ground may contain remains of more than a million. Not too long ago scientists counted, measured, and photographed them. To find out where they were manufactured, McGovern put some of the shards inside a nuclear reactor. Using instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), tiny, ground-­up samples of four-­thousand-­year-­old pottery were bombarded with neutron beams, so their basic chemical elements turned radio­active. The precise soil composition found on each sample was measured using gamma-­ray emissions, providing a soil fingerprint. McGovern’s team compared the results to databases of clay deposits. The result? Amphoras weren’t made all over the place. Just as Pittsburgh was known for steel, and Detroit for cars, most of the ancient clay came from a narrow coastal region near the present-­day Israeli city of Ashkelon.

McGovern thinks the people there specialized in the trade, making about five hundred jars per month over a two-­hundred-­and-­fifty-­year period. That research lends credence to a passage the Greek historian Herodotus wrote around 425 BC, describing one of the first recycling programs in history, which delivered used Egyptian wine jars to Syria:

Twice a year wine is brought into Egypt from every part of Greece, as well as from Phoenicia, in earthen jars . . . The burgomaster of each town has to collect the wine-­jars within his district, and to carry them to Memphis, where they are all filled with water by the Memphians, who then convey them to this desert tract of Syria. And so it comes to pass that all the jars which enter Egypt year by year, and are there put up to sale, find their way into Syria, whither all the old jars have gone before them.

The Egyptians also wrote poems about wine dating back to at least three thousand years ago, such as this line from The Flower Song: “To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me: I draw life from hearing it.” That poem led me back even further, to a Sumerian drinking song from about four thousand years ago, sung along the Silk Road or in cities of the Fertile Crescent: “We are in a happy mood, our hearts are joyful! [. . .] Let the pouring of the sweet liquor resound pleasantly for you!” And this passage is from The Tale of Sinuhe, an epic Egyptian poem written roughly four thousand years ago:

It was a good land called Yaa.

Figs were in it and grapes.

It had more wine than water.

My vague notions of ancient wine were expanding in all directions. I’d expected simplicity, yet found complexity and strong emotions from various cultures, much like the passionate sentiments of wine enthusiasts today. The Egyptians named vineyards, winemakers, and the quality of various vintages. I read early poems and stories from various cultures that distinguished between beer, fruit wine, grape wine, medicinal wine, and even sesame wine. I learned about Geštinanna, a Sumerian wine goddess, and Ninkasi, a goddess of alcohol and fermentation. Heroes and heroines went on epic journeys to netherworlds awash in plenty of intoxicating liquids. I even smiled at ancient jokes: “If I had a wine jar on my shoulder, my shoulder would not hurt.”

One January I saw a notice for a Patrick McGovern lecture, and decided to go. “Uncorking the Past: Fermentation as Earth’s Earliest Energy System and Humankind’s First Biotechnology” promised to answer some of my basic wine science questions. About two hundred students, faculty, and members of the public filled the University of Alabama auditorium, which seemed like a sizeable turnout for a wonky lecture. After a short introduction McGovern pointed to a slide of S. cerevisiae—the yeast winemakers, brewers, and bakers use—and told the audience, “What it does is take sugar, and excrete it, you might say, into alcohol and also into carbon dioxide. This would have been quite exciting, I think, to ancient humans. It was like some sort of mysterious force from beyond that was causing this transformation.” Fermentation helps preserve food, adds flavors, and produces a by-­product with mind-­altering effects, McGovern explained, so humans had plenty of reasons to worship the process, even if they didn’t understand how it worked.

Animals imbibe, too, from fruit flies all the way up to elephants. “The fruit fly feeds its young with alcohol, which is very curious.” McGovern said that the fly has many of the same genes for “getting drunk” as humans. Other researchers used a somewhat bizarre contraption called an inebriometer to precisely measure the tipsiness of individual fruit flies as they wobbled down test tubes, like some insect version of a state trooper asking Saturday night drivers to walk a line. They christened the relevant genes with joking nicknames:

McGovern told the crowd about birds feeding on fermented fruit and getting so drunk they fall off branches, and of zebra finches that slur their songs. The Malaysian tree shrew drinks the equivalent of nine glasses of wine a night in fermented palm nectar, yet doesn’t get inebriated for some unknown reason. Elephants raiding Indian breweries have inspired headlines such as “Is Every Single Elephant a Village-­Wrecking Booze Hound?” and “Trunk and Disorderly,” though some question how much alcohol the animals really ingested.

I’d come to the lecture expecting a lot of talk about wine and beer, but McGovern made a broader point: a wide variety of species love or struggle with alcohol, all driven by individual genes. That suggests a primordial origin, perhaps as far back as 140 million years ago, when the first fruiting trees emerged. There’s cosmic alcohol, too, McGovern said, such as ethyl formate in the Sagittarius B2 dust cloud. “It turns out that in the star-­forming regions of the Milky Way . . . right at the center, maybe twenty-­five million light years from here, there are huge clouds of alcohol. This has been established by spectroscopic methods. So we could go and mine some of that alcohol if we had the right kind of spaceship to get us out there,” he joked. “It does show you that alcohol is an intrinsic compound in the universe.”

McGovern said humans probably made fermented beverages at a very early date, meaning tens of thousands of years ago. But there’s no evidence left to analyze. Pottery didn’t exist for most of the Paleolithic Period / Old Stone Age era, which began 2.6 million years ago and concluded about 10,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. According to McGovern, human sensory organs haven’t changed much over time, so it’s likely we explored ways to ferment alcohol long before the earliest evidence of Middle Eastern pottery, which is about only 8,000 years old. But pottery made the booze more storable and transportable.

Towards the end of the lecture an offhand comment from McGovern excited me. He spoke of using data from experimental archaeology in the real world, to re-­create ancient beers. He said it was “absolutely necessary” to taste a wide variety of modern beverages to understand the old ones. The audience laughed, but I felt a kinship from my Cremisan experience.

In 1999 McGovern led a team that used archaeobiology to identify the food and drink served during King Midas’s funeral feast, held in about 700 BC in what is now central Turkey. The scientists examined all the different residues on the bowls and jugs found at the site in order to re-­create a sort of culinary time capsule. All the vessels held the same mixture of grape wine, barley beer, and honey mead, and eighteen jars found to contain food remains revealed the menu: a stew of goat or sheep meat, perhaps marinated with honey, wine, and olive oil, then cooked with lentils and spices.

After the lecture I introduced myself and McGovern remembered our email exchange about Cremisan. “We drank it when I lived on a kibbutz in Israel,” he said of the 1970s, but without paying attention to the grape varieties.

McGovern’s archaeological and laboratory research was enchanting, but I was interested in the vineyards and wines of the present, too. I’d visited the Middle East several times, mostly writing about conflict and turmoil. I was tired of all that. Seven years had passed since the hotel room tasting, and I decided to go find Cremisan and drink their wine again. I filled notebooks with questions and lists, forgetting about a line of Persian poetry that McGovern quotes: “Whoever seeks the origins of wine must be crazy.”

With the Wine Grapes DNA research in mind, my wine pilgrimage became an expedition. I thought of Kermit Lynch’s 1988 classic Adventures on the Wine Route, a lovely, quirky tour of France. Instead I would travel the original wine routes, from the Caucasus Mountains down to the Holy Land, across the Mediterranean and north through Europe. That’s how winemaking spread throughout history. I’d interview scientists and archaeologists, seeking facts instead of just colorful myths. My father, may he rest in peace, worried when he felt I didn’t have a plan in life. I had one now.

I was excited but nervous. I needed a wine science boot camp. Luckily José Vouillamoz agreed to let me spend some time with him in Switzerland, and there were other hopeful developments regarding Cremisan. A group of Israeli researchers had scoured the region for native grapes and performed DNA analysis on them. I wanted to learn what they found. A small distributor in the United States had also just started importing some Cremisan wines, but that wasn’t enough to stop my trip.

In between booking flights I kept exploring the origins of wine, and learned that some modern alcohol laws have an ancient heritage. From underage drinking to DUIs and how to define drunkenness, societies have long struggled to balance wine with civilized behavior.

Two passages in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, the world’s oldest law document, mention wine-­related punishments for women. One concerned a priestess who had left a temple to drink (the punishment was death); the other may be the ancient version of holding barkeepers accountable for the size of a drink: “If a tavern-­keeper (feminine) does not accept corn according to gross weight in payment of drink, but takes money, and the price of the drink is less than that of the corn, she shall be convicted and thrown into the water,” reads one translation. So did male tavern-­keepers get the same punishment, or did men just not do that job? No one knows.

Around 360 BC Plato described various commonsense prohibitions on drinking. “Let us then discourse a little more at length about intoxication, which is a very important subject, and will seriously task the discrimination of the legislator,” said Plato’s Athenian Stranger. “Shall we begin by enacting that boys shall not taste wine at all until they are eighteen years of age[?] [. . .] this is a precaution which has to be taken against the excitableness of youth;—afterwards they may taste wine in moderation up to the age of thirty.”

The Stranger also suggested that “no one while he is on a campaign [i.e., war] should be allowed to taste wine at all . . . and that no magistrates should drink during their year of office, nor should pilots of vessels or judges while on duty taste wine at all, nor any one who is going to hold a consultation about any matter of importance; nor in the day-­time at all, unless in consequence of exercise or as medicine; nor again at night, when any one, either man or woman, is minded to get children.”

Throughout the third to fifth centuries AD, rabbis in Babylon debated how long it takes to walk off a bender. “A quarter of a lug of Italian wine inebriates a man; when a man is inebriated, he must not decide any legal questions; a walk neutralizes the effects of wine,” reads the Mishnayot (a kind of religious common law). It goes on to suggest that if a Torah scholar is called on to nullify a vow, but has drunk too much, he must walk three miles (not just one) before making the decision. The Mishnayot also provides guidance on judging whether someone is tipsy or drunk. “What is meant by tipsy? If a man were compelled to speak to the king and still had sense enough to do so, he is merely tipsy; but one who would not be able to do this is considered intoxicated.”

Ancient clay tablets from Mesopotamia also suggest the business of wine hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. “If no good wine is available there for you to drink, send me word and I will have good wine sent to you to drink. Since your home town is far away, do write me whenever you need anything, and I will always give you what you need.” That was written about 3,800 years ago in the now-­dead language of Akkadian and found in Syria, in what was once the city of Mari, an important trading center on the Euphrates River, near the present-­day Iraqi–Syrian border. Archaeologists have discovered more than twenty-­five thousand tablets there, and many of them show how geography, politics, and money influenced the spread of wine. The ledgers from the Mari tablets kept a detailed record of who drank what:

“Expenditure of wine for dinner of Babylonians”

“Expenditure of wine for Babylonian generals when they received their gifts”

“Expenditure of wine as gift for Babylonian troops”

If you’ve ever struggled to budget enough wine for a large event, take heart. At least you didn’t have to supply an army. An Egyptian king sent a firm reminder to Mari that wine was obligatory, not optional: “Be prepared for the arrival of the archers of the king, with much food at hand, wine, and everything needed. P.S. Be assured that the king is as well as the sun god in the sky; his soldiers and his [chariots] are in very, very good condition.”

Wine was important enough that the Hittite army, which conquered cities such as Ninevah in biblical times, had an official position called gal gestin, or “chief of the wine stewards.” And just like today, some people said the main purpose in life should be having fun. The tomb of a Hittite king who ruled around 1400 BC was decorated with a statue of him seeming to snap his fingers and the inscription “Eat, drink and be merry, for everything else is not worth that.”

Tastings

Some early alcohol was made solely from grapes, but it could also be a kind of boozy goulash—a mixture of beer and wine. Peasants and royalty alike drank concoctions made from wheat, barley, rice, dates and other fruit, plus all sorts of spices. Over time wine, beer, and eventually distilled spirits settled into their own tribes. For thousands of years we have defined wine as something made entirely from grapes, so I didn’t feel the need to explore the history of those other beverages. Maybe someday. Luckily you can get a sense from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery’s line of Ancient Ales, created in close collaboration with Patrick McGovern:

Midas Touch: Based on analysis of what’s believed to be the tomb of King Midas; “a sweet yet dry beer made with honey, barley malt, white muscat grapes and saffron.”

Chateau Jiahu: Based on analysis of a Chinese tomb, made with “hawthorn fruit, sake rice, barley and honey.”

Ta Henket: Made with ingredients listed in Egyptian hieroglyphics, a beer that contains an ancient variety of wheat, chamomile, palm fruit, and Middle Eastern herbs, and fermented with a native yeast strain from Cairo.

Kvasir: Based on a 3,500-­year-­old site in Denmark, and made with “wheat, lingonberries, cranberries, myrica gale, yarrow, honey and birch syrup.”