Alicia Steffann

The plant family that the grape belongs to has produced fossils and rocks dating back to about 50 million years ago.

Fermentation, which produces wine, is a natural process.

Therefore, the earliest wine was probably an accidental affair.

Fruit would have fallen from the vine and fermented on its own, even though nobody was there to find it.

Grapes would have undergone a metabolic process in which they converted sugar into alcohol.

Then pretty quickly, the liquid would have turned to vinegar.

In short, people did not need to invent wine or figure out how to make it.

Nature took care of that for us.

So when did the first people discover the products of fermented grapes?

Evidence points to a possible origin of about 6,000 BCE.

Residue in a clay jar found in the Eastern European country of Georgia suggests it contained wine.

Similar jars from a site in Iran's northern Zagros Mountains indicates the same use.

In his documentary, The Most Serious History of Wine, Jim Hodgson theorizes that these Neolithic wines may have been made when someone sealed up grape juice in a jar and accidentally made a wine out of it.

On the other hand, religious literature puts forth various competing origin stories with a lot more drama involved.

For example, tales about its creation appear in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Persian story of Jamshid.

While wine certainly could have evolved in multiple places at once, the area geographers now call Transcaucasia was a probable hotbed of

This region would have included modern-day Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, northern Iran, and eastern Turkey.

In his book, Inventing Wine, expert Paul Lukacs clarifies that wine was not the first alcoholic beverage people produced.

He points, for example, to an older beverage made by people in the Henan province of China consisting of honey, fruit juice, and rice beer.

Indeed, people in many locations were using all sorts of ingredients to produce similar beverages by the time wine came on the scene.