Wine culture - The gift of Old Europe to the ancient world
Nowadays, wine is cultivated on all continents, except in Antarctica. Wine is popular, widely served and consumed around the world, except for Islamic societies. This blog is concerned with questions such as: Where does wine come from? How has wine culture spread?
In most of our schoolbooks, we find outdated information about the origin of wine. Many textbooks state that the first winegrowers and producers would have been the Greeks. However, archaeological findings show that viticulture was practiced in Old Europe before the Greeks. Viticulture and ultimately winemaking were an integral part of the agricultural culture of Old Europe.
Wine production developed gradually. Originally, wild wine grew north and west of the Black Sea, and also in the Caucasus region. At first perhaps only animals ate the grapes, and sometimes local people might have tasted the fruit. Researchers’ earlier assumption that “wine production from wild grape began already in the early Neolithic period” has been scientifically proven (Nikolov 2007). The oldest archaeological evidence for the use of wild grapes for a fermented drink comes from the Caucasus region (present-day Georgia and Armenia) and dates back already to the 7th millennium BCE. During that time, however, grapes were not yet cultivated for wine.
The earliest evidence of grape pressing was found also in the Caucasus region (in Georgia c. 6000 BCE, in western Azerbaijan c. 5000 BCE), but one still could not yet speak of an organized wine culture. The oldest traces of regular grape pressing into juice point to the time of the Old European civilization, in the area of present-day Greece, and they date to around 4500 BCE. Wine was pressed into juice in the Neolithic-period settlement of Dikili Tash, which is located in Greek Macedonia. The Greeks later adopted wine production from Old Europe, from the Pelasgians. Having adopted it, they then further developed viticulture and spread the skill of making wine throughout the coastal regions of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea via their colonies.
One piece of evidence that viticulture and winemaking culture were not originally a Greek invention is to examine Greek loanwords. The vocabulary related to viticulture is not originally Indo-European, but of Old European origin. This is evident from the substrata of the very oldest layers of the language, which include, among other things, the following vocabulary: oinos ‘wine’, omphax ‘unripe grape’, ampelos ‘vine, botrus ‘grape’, gigarton ‘grape seed’, rax ‘grape’, thrinia ‘wine (Cretan)’, trux ‘unfermented wine, new wine, must’, trugia ‘sweet wine’, trugao ‘harvest (especially the gathering and pressing of grapes)’, truge ‘wine harvest’, targanon ‘wine vinegar (sour wine)’. This information combined with archaeological research data shows that the vocabulary points to an already well-established viticulture and processing. Wine, new wine, sweet wine, sour wine, that is, wine vinegar, etc. were made from wine grapes. The vocabulary also conveys stages of wine cultivation, seeds, unripe grapes, wine harvest, wine yield, etc.
The Greek historian Thucydides d. c. 400 BCE) values wine culture as a sign of civilization in the following way: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the wine”. Thanks to Thucydides for recognizing the ancient Europeans as civilized people, because they were the first in Europe who began to cultivate olives and wine. The olive was pressed into olive oil. The names of both (elaia “olive”, oinos “wine”) are pre-Greek loanwords. They show that both delicacies are part of Old Europe’s cultural heritage. The name of the god of wine, Dionysus, and his cult also date back to the pre-Greek period which means that it too was transferred into Greek culture. The cult of Dionysus and the wine festivals connected with it were common in Greece already by about 700 BCE.
According to the myth, Dionysus grew up on the slopes of Mount Nysa. This mountain, whose very name is pre-Greek, is located in the region of Boeotia in Central Greece. It was within the sphere of influence of the rain nymphs, and they raised the young Dionysus, who liked the grapes of the wild vinegrapes and discovered the secrets of making wine. The Greeks honor Dionysus because he revealed important know-how to people and gave them a precious gift, the skill of making wine.
In modern Greece, the most popular type of wine is retsina, which has the peculiar characteristic that it tastes a bit like resin. Resin is part of the wine’s preserving substance, and its use in winemaking has been documented already early on, during the period of ancient Greece. Greeks have thus drunk retsina wine since ancient times. In ancient times, the Greeks’ everyday breakfast included a piece of bread which was dipped in wine so that it would get more flavor. Drinking wine was at that time an everyday thing; it was often consumed diluted as an everyday beverage. Wine was also used in ritual ceremonies as well as together with food at celebrations. Among the most popular festivals were so-called symposia, during which the occasion often led to heavy drunkenness.
The history of wine from ancient Greece onwards is well known. When the Greeks founded colonies around the Aegean Sea and on the Mediterranean coasts, as far as Spain, wine culture spread across three continents: Europe, Asia, Africa. The Etruscans and Romans inherited this culture and spread it even more widely, as far as Central Europe. Immigrants took wine culture to colonies in different parts of the world, and different continents developed their own wine cultures, local traditions.
REFERENCES
Haarmann Harald (2019) “Mystery of the Danube Civilisation – The discovery of Europe´s oldest civilisation, Marix Verlag.
Nikolov Vasil (2007) “Culture and art of prehistoric Thrace.” Lettera Publisher.