SUBSISTENCE × SOCIETY

The Oldest Wine, in Georgia

~6000 BCE

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Northgrippian

Two Neolithic villages in Georgia, in the South Caucasus, have yielded large pottery jars whose walls hold absorbed organic compounds read as the residue of grape wine, at about 6000 to 5800 BCE. The jars are among the earliest pottery made in the Near East and the commonest type at sites of the Shulaveri-Shomutepe culture; their very large capacity suggests vessels used in turn to ferment, to age and to serve. The chemical case rests on tartaric acid, which occurs in grapes and grape products: infrared spectrometry and a spot test specific to that acid found it in 1993 in a jar from the Zagros mountains of Iran, and established that the vessel very probably held wine. In Georgia the chemistry is supported by plant remains associated with a jar of the same type and date, grape pollen, starch and fragments of skin.

Why it matters

Fermenting fruit turns a harvest that rots within days into a drink that keeps, and it calls for a vessel large enough to hold the must while the yeasts work. Wine therefore arrives with pottery rather than before it, and the jars carrying the earliest evidence are among the earliest pots of the region. The residue also marks a limit of the method: a chemical signature reports the plant, not the use, so it cannot say whether the liquid was drunk daily, offered or traded. An older fermented drink is known from China, made of rice, honey and fruit as early as the seventh millennium BCE, a different beverage rather than an earlier wine.

Dating & uncertainty

The jars are placed at about 6000 to 5800 BCE, carried here as ~8,000 years before the present within 8,000 to 7,800; the sites themselves run down to about 5000 BCE, so a sherd from a later level would not date the wine. The identification is also contested at its root. A reading published in 2025 accepts the tartaric acid on the sherds but argues that the first product drawn from grapes may have been pekmez, a boiled grape syrup, and not wine: the same acid would then mark the fruit without marking fermentation. Should that reading prevail, the title of earliest wine would change hands, without the evidence for grape processing at this date falling with it.

Sources

1. McGovern et al. (2017), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasusdoi:10.1073/pnas.1714728114
2. Michel et al. (1993), Analytical Chemistry · The first wine & beer. Chemical detection of ancient fermented beveragesdoi:10.1021/ac00056a002
3. McGovern et al. (2004), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Fermented beverages of pre- and proto-historic Chinadoi:10.1073/pnas.0407921102
4. Hirsch (2025), Turkish Journal of Archaeological Sciences · First Pekmez and Later Winedoi:10.63167/tjas.2025.5

Our species’ history as one day

23:23:2536 min 34 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day