Wine did not originate in Georgia 8,000 years ago

he certainties regarding the history of viticulture have all come crashing down! An extensive study involving nearly one hundred researchers published on March 3 in the magazine Science reveals that vines were not domesticated circa 8,000 years ago but 3,000 years before that, concurrently in the fertile crescent of the near East, in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan, and in the Caucasus (present-day Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan).

The Vitis vinifera varieties now grown in Europe stem from this initial cradle. “They come from accidental crossings with wild vines as farmers migrated towards the West”, claims the study’s co-author, Yang Dong, who worked with nearly one hundred researchers in 17 countries.

Vines were initially planted for table grapes but the crossings produced smaller, less sweet grapes with thicker skins “that were not so good for eating, but actually great for making wine”, summarises Robin Allaby on the blog Wineanorak.

To reach their conclusions, the researchers – including Nathalie Ollat in Bordeaux and Thierry Lacombe in Montpellier – sequenced the genome of 3,525 wild vine accessions grown from the collections of several institutions.