Crush a handful of grapes in a bowl, cover it, and leave it somewhere warm. In a few days, it starts to fizz and turns into wine, with no recipe and no inventor needed. So if wine makes itself, what was the hard part? The answer starts with a sour chemical hiding at the bottom of a broken clay jar.
In this video, we trace wine from wasps and split grapes to the oldest proven wine in Georgia, the Armenian cave press, Egypt’s wine jars, Roman pitch, strong English bottles, Pasteur’s microscope, and the insect that nearly wiped out Europe’s vines. At the end, we find out why wine never needed us to begin, only to last.
📚 Resources & Further Reading:
Wikipedia, History of Wine: The overview of how winemaking began in the Caucasus and spread across the ancient world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wine
Wikipedia, Areni-1 Winery: The Armenian cave with a 6,000-year-old wine press, vat and cups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areni-1_winery
Wikipedia, Scorpion I: The Egyptian ruler buried around 3150 BC with about 700 imported wine jars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion_I
Wikipedia, Tartaric Acid: The chemical that works as a fingerprint for ancient wine in clay jars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartaric_acid
Wikipedia, Louis Pasteur: How his microscope work explained why wine spoils, and how his tartaric acid crystals revealed mirror-image molecules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur
Wikipedia, Great French Wine Blight: How the phylloxera insect destroyed European vineyards, and how American roots saved them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight
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👇 Join the Conversation: What surprised you most: wasps carrying wine yeast, a tomb stocked with 700 jars, or the fact that Pasteur studied wine crystals before he ever studied spoilage? Tell me in the comments which everyday thing we should trace back next!
Disclaimer ⚠️ : This video is for education only and does not encourage drinking alcohol. Some figures differ between sources, such as the age of the first domesticated grapes (about 11,000 years by genetics, about 8,000 years by chemical evidence of wine) and the scale of the phylloxera damage. Where accounts disagree, the video says so.
#history #wine #science #HistoryOfWine #pasteur #georgia #ancientegypt #inventionhistory #archaeology #QuillExplains
2 Comments
Amazing History experts ❤
🍷 Wine's oldest chemical fingerprint is tartaric acid, the same compound Pasteur studied under his microscope in 1848.
What surprised you most? Tell me in the comments! 👇