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The discovery that Stone Age humans were interested in growing fruit and developing fermentation processes provides many clues into the lifestyle of early Homo sapiens. The production of wine requires a relatively "stable base of operations," McGovern stated. His research suggests that these early Near East and Egyptian communities would have been more permanent cultures with a stable food supply and domesticated animals and plants. With this abundance of food came the need for containers that were durable and made from a material that was easily pliable—like clay. The porous structure of these clay vessels is what has made it...

Saturday, 3 August, 2002, 10:06 GMT 11:06 UK Brewers concoct ancient Egyptian aleDid King Tut sup on the Old Kingdom recipe?A Japanese beer maker has taken a 4,400-year-old recipe from Egyptian hieroglyphics and produced what it claims is a brew fit for the Pharaohs. The Kirin Brewery Co. has called the concoction Old Kingdom Beer. It has no froth, is the colour of dark tea and carries an alcohol content of 10% - about double most contemporary beers. Sakuji Yoshimura, an Egyptologist at Waseda University in Tokyo, helped transcribe the recipe from Egyptian wall paintings. Kirin spokesman Takaomi Ishii said:...

ELAZIG, Turkey — There are easier places to make wine than the spectacular, desolate landscapes of southeast Turkey, but DNA analysis suggests it is here that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape. ~~~snip~~~ "We wanted to collect samples from wild and cultivated grape vines from the Near East -- that means southeastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia -- to see in which place the wild grape was, genetically speaking, linked the closest to the cultivated variety." "It turned out to be southeastern Anatolia," the Asian part of modern Turkey, said Vouillamoz, speaking at the EWBC wine conference in the...

HELSINKI - Finnish scientists are analyzing a golden, cloudy beverage found in a 19th century shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, hoping new beers can be modeled on an ancient brew. The VTT Technical Research Center of Finland said Tuesday that through chemical analysis it aims to determine the ingredients and possibly the recipe used in brewing what it called "one of the world's oldest preserved beers." VTT scientist Arvi Vilpola said he had "the honorable task" of being the one on the research team to sample the brew. "It was a little sour and you could taste...

 Subscribe for free at www.novinite.com Archaeological Discovery in Bulgaria Clue to Ancient Mystery2003-02-13Bulgarian archaeologists discovered an oval ritual hall fitting the description that ancient historians gave to the Dionysus Temple in the Rhodope range famous for its splendor and mysteriousness in antique times and for the many failed attempts to determine its exact location in modernity. During an expedition in 2002, the team of archeologist Nikolay Ovcharov unearthed the hall inside of an ancient Thracian palace, some 250km southeast of Bulgaria's capital Sofia. The temple-palace is part of the dead city of Perpericon in Bulgaria's Eastern Rhodope Mountain that...

Scholars have always suspected that the ancients had odd tastes. If you believe Homer, wise old Nestor, veteran of the Trojan War, enjoyed a few scrapings of goat's cheese and a dollop of honey in his wine. And Homer might have been right: archaeologists often find little bronze cheese graters in later Greek graves which they think were part of a drinking kit. But until now there has been no good evidence that the Minoans and their mainland neighbours the Mycenaeans knew how to brew beer or mead, let alone mixed them into cocktails. After painstaking chemical analysis of cups,...

Tutankhamen liked his wine white 16 February 2006 From New Scientist Print Edition IT SEEMS that Tutankhamen, the teenage king of ancient Egypt, sloped off to the afterlife with a good supply of fine white wine. It's a surprising discovery, considering there is no record of white wine in Egypt until the 3rd century AD, 1600 years after the young pharaoh died. Rosa Lamuela-Raventós and her colleagues from the University of Barcelona, Spain, used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyse the residue from six of the jars in Tutankhamen's tomb. All contained tartaric acid, a chemical characteristic of grapes,...

[ . . . ] The Romans were the first to use wine as a finely calibrated social yardstick - and thus inaugurated centuries of wine snobbery . . . Pliny the Younger, writing in the late first century A.D., described a dinner at which the host and his friends were served fine wine, second-rate wine was served to other guests, and third-rate wine was served to former slaves. [ . . . ] Just how seriously the Romans took the business of wine classification can be seen from the story of Marcus Antonius, a Roman politician who in 87...

Since Colchis was famous in antiquity for gold and precious metal -- it's where the Greek hero Jason went to grab the legendary Golden Fleece -- you'd be wearing gold-spangled robes while pouring and drinking your famous Colchian wine from gold or silver vessels. You'd also be so rich you could afford to bury your wine service with you... A fascinating exhibition, "Wine, Worship & Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani" at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 24, gives a thrilling image of the plenty that nobility enjoyed in that far corner of the ancient...

ROBBIO, Italy (Reuters) - Wine conjures up the image of cultured drinkers sipping their way delicately through a full-bodied vintage. But for two history buffs with a passion for the tipple, northern Italy has the barbarians to thank for its long wine-making tradition. Luca Sormani, from Como, and Fulvio Pescarolo, from the tiny town of Robbio near Milan, have traced the region's wine culture all the way back to its Celtic roots and have started making it according to ancient methods. Celtic tribes from farther north -- known to the Romans as "Barbari" -- conquered northern parts of Italy about...

LONDON -- A University of Barcelona research team has discovered Egypt's King Tutankhamen was partial to wine, preferring red over white. The mystery of exactly what was kept inside jars found in the tomb of the Egyptian king (1336-1327 BC) was solved by the Spanish scientists who analyzed scrapings from eight jars found in Tutankhamen's tomb. They presented their findings on Wednesday at the British Museum in London, The Times of London reported. "Wine jars were placed in tombs as funerary meals," Maria Rosa Guasch-Jane, a master in Egyptology at the university, told The Independent. "The ... wine jars were...

Ancient Mashed Grapes Found in Greece Jennifer Viegas, Discovery NewsAncient Grapes March 16, 2007 — Either the ancient Greeks loved grape juice, or they were making wine nearly 6,500 years ago, according to a new study that describes what could be the world’s earliest evidence of crushed grapes. If the charred 2,460 grape seeds and 300 empty grape skins were used to make wine, as the researchers suspect, the remains might have belonged to the second oldest known grape wine in the world, edged out only by a residue-covered Iranian wine jug dating to the sixth millennium B.C. Since the...

Contact: Allison Byrum a_byrum@acs.org 202-872-4400 American Chemical Society King Tut liked red wine Ancient Egyptians believed in properly equipping a body for the afterlife, and not just through mummification. A new study reveals that King Tutankhamun eased his arduous journey with a stash of red wine. Spanish scientists have developed the first technique that can determine the color of wine used in ancient jars. They analyzed residues from a jar found in the tomb of King Tut and found that it contained wine made with red grapes. This is the only extensive chemical analysis that has been done on a...

LONDON - King Tutankhamen was a red wine drinker, according to a researcher who analyzed traces of the vintage found in his tomb. Maria Rosa Guasch-Jane told reporters Wednesday at the British Museum that she made her discovery after inventing a process that gave archaeologists a tool to discover the color of ancient wine. "This is the first time someone has found an ancient red wine," she said. Wine bottles from King Tut's time were labeled with the name of the product, the year of harvest, the source and the vine grower, Guasch-Jane said, but did not include the color...

Ancient Israelites, with the possible exception of a few teetotaling Nazirites and their moms, proudly drank beer -- and lots of it. Men, women and even children of all social classes drank it. Its consumption in ancient Israel was encouraged, sanctioned and intimately linked with their religion. Even Yahweh, according to the Hebrew Bible, consumed at least half a hin of beer (approximately 2 liters, or a six-pack) per day through the cultic ritual of libation, and he drank even more on the Sabbath (Numbers 28:7-10). People who were sad were advised to drink beer to temporarily erase their troubles...

Chinese archaeologists have claimed to have unearthed a sealed bronze pot containing two kilograms of red liquid during an excavation of an ancient tomb built in the Warring States Period (475 BC - 221 BC). Wafts of the ancient vintage greeted the archaeologists after they opened the pot, The China Daily reports. The find has been sent to Beijing for tests and verification.

The original makers of Côtes-du-Rhône are said to have descended from Greek explorers who settled in southern France about 2500 years ago... The study, by Prof Paul Cartledge, suggested the world's biggest wine industry might never have developed had it not been for a "band of pioneering Greek explorers" who settled in southern France around 600 BC. His study appears to dispel the theory that it was the Romans who were responsible for bringing viticulture to France. The study found that the Greeks founded Massalia, now known as Marseilles, which they then turned into a bustling trading site, where local...

(05-18) 18:18 PDT CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Archaeologists digging in a 5,000-year-old site in southern Egypt have unearthed 200 rough ceramic beer and wine jars and a second mud-brick mortuary enclosure of King Hur-Aha the founder of the First Dynasty, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said Wednesday. A joint American excavation mission from Yale University, Institute of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania University Museum and New York Universities found the treasure Wednesday at Shunet El-Zebib, north of Abydos in the Upper Egyptian city of Sohag.

The "winery" consisted of two stone buildings connected with an wooden passage. One of the buildings was filled up with grapes, which was then pressed with large rectangular stones. According to the archaeological team, similar wineries have been found the Caucasus, the Crimean Peninsula, Serbia, Israel. Yotov... said the last such "winery" was found in Israel at the beginning of 2009, and is believed to have been the largest in the Byzantine Empire. Yotov thinks the winery of the fortress near Byala was part of a monastery... The fortress near Byala is located on an area of 38-40 decares, and...

The excavation being carried out at Tal-Log'g'a in Mg'arr ix-Xini. An archaeological site being excavated at Mg'arr ix-Xini has further enforced the notion that viticulture and wine production have been an important part of the Maltese economy since the Classical period. The excavation site, at Tal-Log'g'a, is in a field next to where two troughs dug into the rock were found and is believed to have been used for grape pressing. The field is being excavated in a bid to shed more light on the troughs' use. Some 15 sets of troughs have been found in Mg'arr ix-Xini valley to...