ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, June 6, 1996 TAG: 9606060084
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: FAYE FLAM PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
CONNOISSEURS WOULD HAVE turned up their noses at this wine and its turpentine-laced flavor.
Before man invented the wheel or wrote the first word, he made wine.
A scientist today announced the earliest evidence of winemaking in the form of a yellowish stain on a fragment of a 7,000-year-old pottery jar. Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist from the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed the relic that was excavated from a mountainous region of northern Iran. He found that the stain contained traces of tartaric acid, a telltale sign of wine.
Because of the light color, he said, ``We think it might be a white wine.'' McGovern also found tree resin, which he said was used to preserve the wine and possibly mask any vinegary taste, a problem that may have been harder to avoid in the days before glass.
Today's issue of the journal Nature reported on the findings of McGovern and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, and Mary Voigt of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., who excavated the jar.
Connoisseurs would send this wine back to the kitchen. The tree-resin preservative, which kills bacteria and was commonly used to preserve ancient wines, would have given it a nasty, turpentine-laced flavor, according to the book ``On Food and Cooking'' by Harold McGee.
The shard of pottery was found in what archaeologists believe was the kitchen of a mud-brick house. It appears to have come from a slim-necked, 9-inch-high vessel, similar to others found at the site.
The date, 5400 to 5000 B.C., pushes back the earliest known date of winemaking by 2,000 years to the Neolithic period, or late Stone Age.
``This was the time of the formation of the first permanent settlements,'' McGovern said. People had domesticated barley, goats, cattle and pigs. They may have begun to cultivate grapes, McGovern said, but it is more likely that they used the wild grapes that flourish in this part of what is now the Middle East.
Archaeologists have known that wine drinking has ancient roots. By the time of the ancient Egyptians, wine had become extremely popular.
``We have beautiful tomb reliefs showing grapevines grown on trellises,'' McGovern said. The artwork also shows the way the Egyptians pressed the grapes, by foot, and further extracted juice by gathering the grapes in bags and beating them with sticks.
But because grapes are not native to Egypt, many suspected that wine originated earlier, around what is now the Middle East, where wild grapes still flourish.
A breakthrough came in 1990, when Virginia Badler, a graduate student at Haverford College, discovered a red stain on an urn from western Iran that dated to 3500 B.C. An analysis revealed the characteristic wine residues of tartaric acid.
Thursday's findings, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature,Today's Nature article pushed that date back further.
There is no reason to think wine drinking could not go back more than 100,000 years, McGovern said. Even primitive hunter-gatherers could have picked wild grapes and fermented them in leather bags or stone vessels.
The invention of pottery around 8000 B.C. probably greatly advanced the winemaking art, allowing people to keep out the air, which turns wine to vinegar.
The site also yielded pottery ``corks'' or stoppers that would have sealed the bottle. To drink it, the owner probably had to break off the top of the bottle, McGovern said.
He and Badler are also known for a 1990 discovery of the earliest evidence for beer, based on residues left on a pottery shard found in Iran and dating to around 3100 B.C.
In Europe, ancient people probably drank beer as well as mead, a drink made from fermenting honey, McGovern said.
Almost every group of people around the world has developed some form of alcoholic beverage.
``Everyone made alcohol except for people of Tierra del Fuego and the Eskimos,'' who lived in areas too cold to allow things to ferment, McGovern said.
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP, Traces of two chemicals indicate this 7,000-year-oldby CNBpottery jar contained wine. color.