Uncorking the Past Read online

  Could it be that the cauldrons in the Italian warrior tombs also held a grog rather than wine? This hypothesis is ripe for biomolecular archaeological investigation. The presence of the cheese graters in these graves is a very strong signal that these vessels held a mixed fermented beverage. These heroic warriors had little need for a cheese grater in this life or the next, except to prepare the ceremonial Greek kykeon, which was garnished with cheese. The females, who accompanied the warriors to their graves, also wore clothes that were held together by fibulae with attached miniature cheese-grater pendants. Like Hecamede and Circe in the Homeric epics, these women probably prepared the kykeon for their fallen heroes, following in the long tradition of women serving as beverage makers in the ancient world. Moreover, the early Greek inscription on the Rhodian kotyle from Pithekoussai implies that it contained a stronger version of the kykeon beverage in Nestor’s cup.

  Archaebotanical and other archaeological evidence can be cited in support of the hypothesis that a Greek-style mixed beverage was known in the West. For example, a cauldron containing a piece of honeycomb was found in the courtyard building at Murlo in Tuscany, dated before 575 B.C. Phiales (handleless drinking cups of eastern Mediterranean type) and pilgrim flasks found at Casale Marittimo appear to have contained a resinated mixed beverage flavored with hazelnuts and pomegranates, and more honeycomb was found inside a strange cylindrical vessel, possibly used for fermentation, at this site. Biconical kraters from eighth- to seventh- century B.C. tombs at Verucchio yielded both grape pollen and cereal grains, suggesting that something more than pure grape wine was being produced.

  I am proposing that the Etruscans, like peoples in other parts of Europe, already had a tradition of making a mixed fermented beverage before the Phoenicians and Greeks arrived on their shores. The traders lured them into the eastern Mediterranean wine culture by presenting them with cauldrons, kraters, and other drinking vessels. At first, the Etruscans simply adapted the vessels to their existing customs, using them for their native mixed beverage, as the Celtic princes and their coteries did farther to the north (chapter 5). They went on to make their own versions of the vessels—“mixing bowls” with high pedestals and silver and gilded drinking bowls of Phoenician style—and in time were won over to the eastern Mediterranean wine culture. Of course, only extensive chemical analysis of a range of native and foreign vessel types dating from before, during, and after the Etruscans’ contact with the traders will show whether my hypothesis is correct.

  Either wild or domesticated grapes might also have gone into the Etruscan grog, as numerous grape pips were recovered from a Middle Bronze Age subterranean room at San Lorenzo a Greve at the gates to Florence. But we have to wait until the beginning of the Iron Age in the ninth century B.C., when the traders began to arrive in force, to see large-scale wine production take off, steadily gaining momentum in the following centuries until it displaced the Etruscan grog. Just as the Canaanites tutored the Egyptians and probably later the Minoans in viticulture, the Phoenicians likely passed along their knowledge, as well as transplanted grapevines from their homeland, to the Etruscans. The transfer of the Semitic alphabet followed, and like Greek, the first Etruscan and Roman inscriptions were inscribed on wine vessels. Presumably many other accoutrements of the eastern Mediterranean wine culture were also enthusiastically embraced. From these small beginnings, Italian winemaking grew to be the enormous enterprise that it is today.

  I believe that the Phoenicians were mainly responsible for bringing Etruria into the wine-culture fold, at least during the initial stages of foreign contact, as the Greeks were still largely wedded to their kykeon. The Etruscan amphora is modeled after the Phoenician amphora, and similarity of form often implies similarity of function and contents. The answers will come only from more intensive excavation of early Etruscan coastal sites, where amphoras predominate, and the discovery and investigation of more Mediterranean shipwrecks holding wine-related pottery. The Phoenician settlements most likely to have had a role in bringing viniculture to Etruria are Motya, an offshore island at the western tip of Sicily, and the Lipari islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Motya later became known for its exquisite Marsala wine.

  Grapevines embedded in soil found among the substantial cargo of the fourth-century B.C. El Sec wreck, off the coast of Majorca, suggest that they were being transported for transplantation. This ship also carried numerous amphoras from throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, drinking bowls (skyphoi) of the Athenian Fat Boy type, and cauldrons and buckets in styles well documented elsewhere in Europe for making a mixed fermented beverage.

  Several grapevine fragments in soil aboard a single ship, however, may be insufficient evidence of intended transplantation. The recently excavated Grand Ribaud shipwreck off the coast of southern France, dated to about 600 B.C., also contained numerous grapevines, but they are believed to have served to cushion the seven to eight hundred amphoras the ship was carrying. Perhaps grapevines were also used as cushioning on the El Sec ship, but it is strange that so much soil was preserved on the example illustrated in the published report, unless the goal was to keep the vines alive and ready to replant.

  A profusion of Iron Age shipwrecks have now been located and excavated along the Italian and French coasts. They were so heavily loaded with wine-related vessels that one could say that the transfer of Phoenician and Greek culture to the western Mediterranean was mediated by their wine cultures.

  Whether the Etruscans learned to make wine from the Phoenicians or from the Lydians of western Anatolia, as implied by Herodotus, they went on to become the principal exporters of wine to southern France by 600 B.C. The Romans followed in their footsteps, and as they say, the rest is history: wine continued northward to trans-Alpine Burgundy and the Mosel, displacing the native beverages, until it reached the northern limit of the domesticated vine. The Nordic grog still prevailed in the regions beyond.

  COLONIZING IN THE WEST

  The Phoenicians and the Greeks had much to gain by founding permanent colonies in the western Mediterranean, closer to their prospective clients. Rather than ship wine thousands of kilometers from the east, they could plant vineyards on foreign soil and begin producing wine for local consumption.

  The Greek success in following this formula can be seen in the coastal cities of Oenotria (“the land of trained vines”), now Calabria in the toe of Italy. Their efforts here show how serious they were about promoting the culture of the vine and wine. One city, Sybaris, flourished to such an extent that its name became synonymous with a luxurious and dissolute lifestyle.

  In 2005, I had a chance to see how these Greek and Phoenician efforts had paid off in Italy when I was invited to travel there at the invitation of the Associated Winegrowers of Italy (Associazione Nazionale Città del Vino). Apparently, the translation of my book Ancient Wine (L’archeologo e l’uva) had struck a chord in the wine-loving Italian soul. After giving a lecture at an Etruscan wine conference in Tuscany, I embarked on a journey southward in the company of Paolo Benvenuti, director of Città del Vino, and Andrea Zifferero, an Etruscan archaeologist from the University of Siena. We set our sights on experimental vineyards throughout Italy. At Pompeii at the base of Mount Vesuvius, we visited the project of the Mastroberardino Winery. Its vintners are growing what they consider to be Roman cultivars here (e.g., Greco di Tufo, Coda di Volpe or Foxtail, and Vitis Apiana/Fianco/Muscat) on the site of an ancient excavated vineyard, using Roman trellis methods. These include training the cordons or branches to grow on a single support, on more elaborate arbors and pergolas, or up a tree. The most common Roman method, as today, was to train the vines to grow vertically upward so as to open the grapes to air flow and sunlight to ripen them and to facilitate care and harvesting. This experiment has led to the release of a high-end wine named after the famed Villa of Mysteries (Villa dei Misteri).

  We then traveled on to ancient Oenotria, where we examined the association’s project at Locri, devoted to growing the numerou
s Italian varieties (upward of one thousand) and preserving this wealth of grape genetic or germplasm diversity. Much remains to be learned about the modern varieties and their ancient roots, figuratively and literally. For example, my geneticist colleague José Vouillamoz recently identified the immediate forebears of Sangiovese, the famous Tuscan cultivar, as Ciliegiolo and Calabrese Montenuovo. Although Ciliegiolo is a well-known variety in Tuscany, Calabrese Montenuovo is almost extinct in Campania and Calabria (conjectured to be its home). Earlier ancestors of the vine could have come from Greece, but this theory is yet to be confirmed. Preserving the varieties now growing in the country will enable their ancestry to be ascertained and contribute to new varieties with desirable characteristics.

  But to return to the larger picture of Phoenician colonization in the West, their largest colony was Carthage, on the North African coast in what is now Tunisia. According to classical sources, the city was founded in the late ninth century B.C., when the Assyrians threatened the Phoenician city of Tyre, and Elissa (Dido), a Tyrian princess, fled by ship. Archaeological evidence roughly supports this chronology. Dido and her band of Tyrian patricians settled in an ideal, strategic spot at the end of a peninsula across from Motya. The main settlement occupied a high promontory with a port at its base and large lagoons to the north and south. A vast hinterland of rich soils, very similar to those of their homeland, invited the Phoenicians to plant cereals and, above all, the domesticated grapevine.

  The north African coast was much less densely populated than other regions of the Mediterranean, so the Phoenicians could adopt a different strategy with the native Berbers, who were pastoral nomads. Rather than keeping a low profile and offering aid in setting up industries to promote trade, the Phoenicians became true colonialists. In the following centuries, as Carthage grew and sprouted satellite settlements along the coast, it became the capital of the Punic empire and a supplier of goods to the Roman empire. Its prosperity has recently been revealed by Robert Ballard and his fellow deep-sea explorers. Using a submarine and a remotely operated vehicle, they have documented numerous trading ships and long lines of amphoras spread out on the sea floor at a depth of one thousand meters: these fall on a direct line from Carthage through the Tyrrhenian Sea’s Skerki Bank and on to the Roman port at Ostia. Those ships and their cargoes may have gone down, but many more made the journey safely.

  Wine was the beverage of choice in ancient Carthage. One of the first treatises on viniculture and other forms of agriculture was composed by a third- to second-century B.C. Carthaginian named Mago, who is quoted extensively by later Roman writers (Varro, Columella, and Pliny the Elder). Presumably he drew on Phoenician traditions dating from the founding of the colony. To date, however, the earliest excavated evidence for the domesticated grape at Carthage is pips from the fourth century B.C.

  Although the wild grape grows in Tunisia, special measures had to be taken to enable the domesticated vine to survive in the hot climate. Mago advised on how to aerate the soil and plant vineyards to compensate for the low rainfall. His recipe for raisined wine involved picking the grapes at peak ripeness, rejecting damaged berries, drying the grapes in the sun for several days under a reed shelter (taking care to cover them at night so that they were not dampened by the dew), resaturating the fruit with fresh juice, and then treading it out. A second batch was prepared in the same way, and then the two lots were combined and fermented for about a month, finally being strained into vessels with leather covers. Mago’s raisined wine can be compared in taste and production methods to a luscious Tuscan Vin Santo or an Amarone from the Valpolicella region of northern Italy. To make an Amarone, harvested grapes are first dried on racks in barns and then trodden, pressed, and fermented on their lees in sealed jars for a month. After filtering, Amarone is further aged in well-sealed jars. Even nearer at hand, however, are the delicious Muscat wines of the island of Pantelleria, less than one hundred kilometers offshore from Carthage.

  Carthage’s influence eventually extended across the Mediterranean to Spain’s Costa del Sol and as far west as the Pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar. The Carthaginians aimed to exploit the rich tin, lead, and silver ores of the Iberian Peninsula’s inland Guadalquivir River. But once again they discovered that the rich maritime plains were ideal locales for colonizing and transplanting their wine culture. Another recent discovery of two seventh-century B.C. shipwrecks in the Bay of Mazarrón, near Cartagena, shows the importance of ship transport in expanding the Punic empire. These two ships, which were excavated by Spain’s National Museum for Maritime Archaeology, are only one-third the length of a standard Byblos ship but would have served admirably for short hauls along the coast.

  Before the arrival of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the native peoples of the southern Spanish coast enjoyed a liberally spiced mixed beverage of barley, emmer wheat, honey, and acorn flour (see chapter 5). Whether under duress or voluntarily, they were soon won over to the wine culture, and today we can enjoy the fruits of the ancient labor that went into laying out the first Spanish vineyards and establishing excellent cultivars.

  When I attended the Barcelona conference on ancient beer in 2004, my colleague at the University of Barcelona, Rosa M. Lamuela-Raventós, invited me on a very special tour of the coastal and mountain wine regions. Rosa and her student Maria Rosa Guasch were responsible for detecting a red pigment in some of the amphoras in Tutankhamun’s tomb and developing a more precise method using liquid chromatography—mass spectrometry—mass spectrometry to identify tartaric acid in ancient samples. We now know that the nineteen-year-old pharaoh drank red wine, but a later study by the Barcelona group showed that at least three of the twenty-six amphoras in his tomb contained white.

  Rosa’s family, Raventós, is a long-established producer of Cava sparkling wine (sold under the Codorníu label), and also owns still-wine estates. After days spent tasting wines and visiting their state-of-the-art vineyards and wineries, followed by nights feasting on thick steaks and Catalan specialties in castles, the high point of the trip came with a visit to Priorat, a remote area away from the coast and at a high altitude. The Raventós winery here, Scala Dei, is named after a twelfth-century Carthusian monastery, which is built into a sheer rock face and whose name recalls Jacob’s stairway to heaven, described in Genesis 28. Low-yield vines provide grapes for the Scala Dei wine, a very intense blend of the native Garnacha with Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. Its alcohol content of 14 percent is high, but other Priorat wines are even more potent, at 16 to 17 percent, near the limit of what an unfortified grape wine can achieve. Descriptions of their deep red colors and layered aromas and tastes cannot suffice; these wines must be experienced firsthand to be appreciated. I later tracked down some of the last bottles of the 2000 Scala Dei in the United States, tucked away on the topmost shelf of Manhattan’s Soho Wines and Spirits. When I open one after aging for ten years or more, it will evoke memories of my trip and the much earlier adventures of the Phoenicians.

  The Phoenicians ventured ever farther afield. They went beyond Gibraltar out into the Atlantic. They traveled to Cornwall in England, where it is believed they exploited the tin ores. They traveled down the west coast of Africa, and if Herodotus is to be believed, they circumnavigated the African continent. Some scholars argue that they even made it to the New World, on the basis of Phoenician inscriptions found in Brazil and eastern North America, but the latter are likely forgeries. So far, no sign of their wine culture has been discovered there; we must look in a different direction to discover where the peoples of the Americas came from and what fermented beverages they produced and enjoyed.

  SEVEN

  THE SWEET, THE BITTER, AND THE AROMATIC IN THE NEW WORLD

  WHEN THE ARCHAEOLOGIST THOMAS DILLEHAY of Vanderbilt University began excavating in 1977 at the small prehistoric settlement of Monte Verde in Chile, he could hardly have imagined the scholarly furor he would arouse. He and his colleagues discovered that the site, located fifty-five kilometers inland from
the Pacific Ocean and once home to about thirty people, was one of the earliest human settlements in the Americas, dated to around 13,000 B.P. If humans had crossed from Siberia to Alaska on a land bridge (Beringia) created at the end of the Ice Age, as available genetic evidence suggested, how had they reached the tip of South America, nearly fifteen thousand kilometers away, so quickly? To many scholars, this discovery flew in the face of conventional wisdom and could not possibly be correct.

  HUNTERS, FISHERMEN, OR FRUIT EATERS?

  It had long been believed that the first humans who arrived in the Americas were highly aggressive and successful hunters who wielded carefully flaked stone spearheads, called Clovis points. With their weapons, they had brought down woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and other extraordinary Ice Age creatures, a practice that contributed to the wholesale extinction of these animals. This picture is now thought to be overdrawn, and the extinctions are attributed to additional factors, such as abrupt shifts in climate, disease, and competition with other mammals (such as the moose and brown bear) coming from Asia.

  The “Clovis First” theory fails on other counts, not least of which is the very early date of Monte Verde. The earliest known site with Clovis points dates to ca. 11,500 B.P., a millennium and a half later than Monte Verde, and is located in northern South America. Moreover, not a single Clovis site has yet been found on either side of the Bering Strait in Alaska or Siberia, where the land crossing began and ended. Another assumption of the Clovis First theory—that the earliest human explorers of the New World traveled inland after the crossing through an ice-free passage between the two massive Laurentide and Cordilleran glaciers covering North America—has been undermined by recent geological data. It is now widely believed that our ancestors, after their trek across Beringia, followed a coastal route southward.