Eight thousand years in a glassEightthousand
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In the hills south of Tbilisi, Neolithic villagers pressed grapes and left them to ferment in large clay jars. When archaeologists tested pottery from two sites, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, they found tartaric acid, the chemical signature of grapes, in vessels about 8,000 years old. Reported in 2017, it is the earliest evidence of winemaking yet found.

The method never died out. Georgians still ferment wine in egg-shaped clay qvevri buried in the cellar floor, a tradition UNESCO recognised in 2013, and grapes like Saperavi still grow in Kakheti, in the east of Georgia. Genetic studies suggest the vine was first domesticated somewhere in this corner of the world, between the Caucasus and Anatolia.

Greek sailors and settlers turned wine into a Mediterranean trade. Around 600 BCE colonists from Phocaea founded Massalia, today's Marseille, and vines followed them into Gaul. In southern Italy and Sicily, which the Greeks knew as Oenotria, 'the land of vines', they planted on a large scale. Amphorae stamped with the maker's home town (Thasos, Chios, Rhodes) were an early form of provenance.

At home, wine was ritual. At the symposium it was mixed with water and shared under the eye of Dionysus, who on this cup, made around 530 BCE, sails a ship with vines climbing its mast. Wine has been made on Santorini since antiquity, and its bone-dry Assyrtiko still grows there in the volcanic soil.

When Roman order collapsed, the Church kept viticulture going. Wine was needed for the Mass, and monasteries had the land, the labour and the literacy to keep records. Benedictines at Cluny and, from 1098, Cistercians at Cîteaux were given vineyards across Burgundy. From around 1110 the Cistercians assembled the Clos de Vougeot, which they walled in the 14th century and held until the Revolution.

What set the monks apart was patience. Generations of careful record-keeping showed that some slopes reliably gave finer wine than their neighbours, and they marked the boundaries with walls and stones. This is the root of terroir and of the climats, the named parcels of the Côte d'Or, including the Côte de Nuits, that UNESCO listed in 2015. On the Rhine, Cistercians at Kloster Eberbach, founded in 1136, did the same for the Rheingau.

Wherever Europeans settled, they planted vines: for the Mass, for the table, and to keep crews healthy on long voyages. Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch East India Company's station at the Cape, wanted wine against scurvy, and had cuttings sent from Europe. The first vines were planted in 1655, and four years later he recorded the first wine.

In 1685 his successor Simon van der Stel founded Constantia, whose sweet wine became famous in Europe. Over the next two centuries the vine followed the flag, and one grape followed the Spanish: Listán Prieto, carried to Mexico, Chile and California, where it became the Mission grape. Everything else on the map came later.

By the 18th century fraud was rife and famous names were being borrowed. Rulers answered by drawing lines. In 1716 Cosimo III de' Medici issued an edict fixing the limits of four Tuscan zones, Chianti among them. In 1737 a royal decree in Hungary set the borders of Tokaj, home of Furmint, and had its vineyards ranked. It is often called the world's first classification of a wine region.

Portugal followed in 1756. The Marquis of Pombal, the minister who rebuilt Lisbon after the 1755 earthquake, chartered a company to regulate Port and within a few years had granite boundary markers set around the Douro's vineyards. These were the first steps toward the idea that a wine's name should mean a specific place, a principle that became law in the 20th century.

Eight years after the Bordeaux ranking, vines began dying in the southern Rhône. The cause, identified within a few years, was phylloxera, a tiny aphid that feeds on grape roots. It had come from North America, most likely on imported vines, helped by fast new steamships that kept it alive on the crossing. It spread through France and then most of Europe, and between 1875 and 1889 French wine production fell by roughly two-thirds.

The remedy, found within about fifteen years, was as strange as the disease: graft European vines onto the rootstocks of American species, which had evolved alongside the pest. Nearly every European vineyard still depends on that partnership. A few places escaped, such as Santorini's volcanic soils and Chile, shut off by desert and mountains. Others lost vines for good: Carménère, a mainstay of the Médoc, was barely replanted.

On 24 May 1976 the English wine merchant Steven Spurrier staged a blind tasting in Paris. Nine leading French judges scored red Bordeaux and white Burgundy alongside Californian wines then barely known in France. The winners were Château Montelena's 1973 Chardonnay and Stag's Leap Wine Cellars' 1973 Cabernet Sauvignon, both from the Napa Valley.

It rested on a hard-won revival. Prohibition (1920–33) had shut most of California's wineries, and only in the 1960s did pioneers such as Robert Mondavi rebuild the industry. The 1976 result did not prove that California was better. It proved that great Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay could come from anywhere with the right vineyard, and it gave a generation of winemakers the confidence to try. When the reds were tasted again in 2006, Californian bottles again took the top places.

For centuries a grape's identity was judged by eye: leaf, bunch, berry. The craft was called ampelography, and its masterpiece was Viala and Vermorel's illustrated Ampélographie (1901–10). Then in 1997 Carole Meredith and John Bowers at UC Davis used DNA fingerprinting to settle a mystery. Cabernet Sauvignon was a chance crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. The world's most planted red was the child of a red grape and a white.

More followed quickly. In 1999 the same team showed that Pinot and Gouais Blanc, a humble peasant grape, were the parents of Chardonnay, Gamay, Aligoté and more than a dozen other varieties of north-eastern France. Syrah's parents, Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche, came to light by the end of the decade, and Zinfandel was matched to Italy's Primitivo and then to an almost extinct Croatian grape. In 1994 a French ampelographer had recognised that Chile's 'Merlot' was really Carménère. Every crossing on our grape lineage map is built on this work.

Wine grapes are a sensitive thermometer. Burgundy's harvest records, kept since the Middle Ages, show 2003 among the earliest vintages in six centuries, and across Europe growers now often pick one to two weeks earlier than in the mid-20th century. Grapes ripen faster, sugar rises and acidity falls, and heat, drought, hail, frost and wildfire smoke have become ordinary risks.

Growers are adapting: picking earlier, shading fruit, planting higher and nearer the poles, and turning to grapes that cope with heat. In 2021 Bordeaux approved six new varieties, including Touriga Nacional, Marselan and Alvarinho, better known as Albariño. Southern England now makes serious sparkling wine, and Assyrtiko, the Santorini grape, is turning up in Australia. The map of wine is being redrawn once more, and this chapter is still being written.