Who Made the First Wine?

Someone left grapes in a vessel. Perhaps they had been crushed; perhaps they split under their own weight. Yeasts found the sugar. Days later, the fruit was something else.

It is a plausible scene. It is also one we cannot place, date, or credit to anyone. Wine had no single inventor waiting to be named. Fermentation occurs without an invitation. The more interesting human act was recognising what had happened—and deciding to repeat it.

The search for wine’s beginning therefore has a small problem: an accident leaves a poor archive. A drink can be made, enjoyed, and disappear. Clay is rather more obliging.

What the jars remember

At Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, in present-day Georgia, archaeologists studied fragments of pottery dating to the early sixth millennium BCE. Chemical analysis found tartaric acid and related compounds absorbed into the clay. In that setting, the researchers identified the residues as the earliest known chemical evidence for grape wine, around 6000–5800 BCE.

There was no bottle, label, or tasting note. Only traces that survived because the vessel did. The discovery tells us that people in the South Caucasus were making grape wine some eight thousand years ago. It does not tell us who made the first wine, nor whether an earlier attempt took place somewhere else and left nothing for us to find.

“The oldest” is a phrase archaeology must use carefully. It usually means the oldest evidence we have so far.

A cave with a clearer story

Roughly two thousand years later, the evidence becomes easier to picture. At Areni-1, a cave in Armenia, excavators found a clay basin and vat alongside grape remains, vessels, and cups. Chemical tests of pottery from the site supported the interpretation that wine was produced there around 4000 BCE.

Here, wine appears as more than a residue in a jar. We can see a place arranged for making it: fruit, equipment, containers, and the possibility of people gathering to drink. The cave also held burials, inviting questions about wine’s role in ceremony. The objects can tell us what was present. The precise meaning of the occasion is harder to recover.

The difference between the Georgian jars and the Armenian cave matters. The first offers earlier chemical evidence of grape wine. The second offers a more complete picture of production. They answer different questions, and neither gives us a name to put on the invention.

The second time

Stories of discovery favour a first moment: the first person to taste the fermenting grapes, the first delighted or regrettable surprise. History is less tidy. Wine became part of human life because someone made it again. Then others worked out which fruit to keep, how to press it, what to put it in, where to store it, and when to open it.

Those choices are still with us. A modern cellar has more instruments and better records, but its central question is ancient: what should happen to the grapes now?

We may never know who made the first wine. We know considerably more about the people who refused to leave the next vintage to chance.