What Wine Remembers

There is a cellar in Kakheti, in eastern Georgia, where a man named Giorgi makes wine the way his family has made it for — and this is his claim, not mine, though the archaeology roughly supports it — longer than any other family on earth. The method is called qvevri winemaking: you crush the grapes, skins and stems and all, and pour the must into a large clay vessel shaped like an enormous egg, buried up to its neck in the earth. You seal it with a stone lid and beeswax. Then you wait. The earth regulates the temperature. The wild yeast does the rest. In six months, you open it, and what comes out is not what you'd find on a shelf at a wine shop in Brooklyn. It's amber-colored, tannic, slightly wild, with a mineral undertone that tastes — and I don't mean this as metaphor — like the ground it was buried in.

I drank a glass of Giorgi's Rkatsiteli in his courtyard on a warm October afternoon, surrounded by walnut trees and the remains of a stone wall that he claimed was medieval but that could, honestly, have been anything. He spoke almost no English. I spoke no Georgian. His nephew translated, mostly. What Giorgi wanted me to understand, and what he communicated through gesture and emphasis and the pouring of another glass before I'd finished the first, was that this wine was not a product. It was a continuity. His grandfather made it this way. His grandfather's grandfather. Back and back and back, he said, waving his hand over his shoulder as if the past were standing behind him.

And the thing is, he's not wrong. Not entirely. The oldest evidence of grape wine production ever found comes from Georgia — specifically from the sites of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, in the South Caucasus, where chemical residue analysis on pottery fragments has confirmed the presence of tartaric acid, the fingerprint of grape wine, dating to approximately 6000 BC. Eight thousand years. When those first Georgian winemakers were fermenting grapes in their clay pots, Gobekli Tepe had already been buried for three millennia, the people of Catalhoyuk were still painting their walls with hunting scenes, and the invention of writing was still three thousand years away.

The story of wine is, in a sense, the story of civilization itself — not because wine caused civilization (though some archaeologists have made that argument with varying degrees of seriousness) but because wine tracks it. Wherever humans settled, organized, traded, conquered, and built, wine followed. Or, more accurately, wine was already there, and civilizations grew up around it like vines around a trellis.

After Georgia, the trail moves south. The oldest known winery — not evidence of wine, but an actual production facility, with a press, fermentation vats, storage jars, and a drainage system — was discovered in 2007 at a cave site called Areni-1, in southern Armenia, near the town of Areni in the Vayots Dzor province. It dates to around 4100 BC, making it roughly six thousand years old. The excavation, led by Boris Gasparyan of the Armenian National Academy of Sciences and Gregory Areshian of UCLA, also turned up desiccated grape seeds, pressed grape skins, and the withered remains of vines — the physical residue of an organized winemaking operation that predates the Egyptian pyramids by fifteen hundred years.

I visited Areni-1 on a trip through Armenia in 2018. The cave sits above a gorge carved by the Arpa River, and the drive from Yerevan is spectacular in the way that everything in Armenia is spectacular — dramatic, vertical, and slightly intimidating. The cave itself is modest. You duck through a low entrance, and there it is: the oldest winery in the world, roped off and spot-lit, with the press basin still visible in the stone floor. It looks exactly like what it is — a hole in the ground where people crushed grapes. Nothing monumental. Nothing grand. Just evidence that six thousand years ago, someone in this valley looked at a pile of grapes and thought: I bet I can do something with these.

The Areni cave also produced the oldest known leather shoe, dating to about 3500 BC, which has nothing to do with wine but which I mention because I find it charming that humanity's oldest shoe and oldest winery are in the same cave. Make of that what you will.

By the third millennium BC, wine had spread across the ancient Near East and into the Mediterranean, carried not by accident but by trade. The Phoenicians — those relentless maritime merchants based in the coastal cities of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos in modern Lebanon — were among the most important vectors. They didn't invent wine, but they industrialized its distribution. Phoenician amphorae — the standardized clay transport jars that were the shipping containers of the ancient world — have been found at sites from Carthage to Cadiz, from Sardinia to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Wherever the Phoenicians established a trading post, they brought grapevines.

This is how wine arrived in the western Mediterranean. The Greeks, who established colonies across southern Italy and Sicily beginning in the eighth century BC, brought their own viticultural traditions, planting vines in Campania and Calabria and producing wines that they considered distinctly inferior to those from the Aegean. But it was the Romans who transformed Mediterranean wine from a luxury trade good into an agricultural industry.

Roman viticulture was systematic in a way that would feel familiar to a modern Napa winemaker. The agronomists Columella and Pliny the Elder wrote detailed treatises on vine cultivation — which varieties suited which soils, how to prune, when to harvest, how to age. Pliny, in his Natural History, catalogued dozens of wine varieties and regions, many of which map directly onto wine regions that still produce today. Falernian wine, from the slopes of Monte Massico in northern Campania, was the most celebrated — aged for fifteen to twenty years, sometimes longer, and commanded prices that would make a Burgundy collector wince. The Roman poet Horace name-drops it constantly. It was, in the modern sense, a prestige cuvee.

What fascinates me about Roman wine culture is not the luxury end but the industrial end. Rome didn't just drink wine; Rome ran on it. The daily ration for a Roman legionary included about a liter of posca — a mixture of sour wine and water — which served as both hydration and mild antiseptic. The enormous terracotta storage jars called dolia, some holding over a thousand liters, have been found at villa rustica sites across Italy, Spain, and southern France. The Monte Testaccio in Rome — an artificial hill near the Tiber — is made almost entirely of broken amphorae, tens of millions of them, discarded after their contents were consumed. It is, in essence, a mountain of ancient recycling, and it's one of my favorite places in Rome, because nothing communicates the scale of Roman consumption quite like a hill made of garbage.

But wine's story is not just about production and trade. It's about memory. Every wine region carries the residue of the people who planted there first, even when those people are long gone.

Consider the Rhone Valley. The Romans planted vines there in the first century BC, around the colony of Vienna — modern Vienne — and expanded into what is now the northern Rhone appellations: Hermitage, Cote-Rotie, Condrieu. The Syrah grape, which dominates the northern Rhone, has been genetically traced to a cross between Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche, two obscure varieties native to southeastern France. It was not, as legend long insisted, brought from Persia by returning Crusaders. (The name “Syrah” probably has nothing to do with Shiraz, much as the story appeals.) But the point is that the grape has been growing in that valley for two thousand years, adapting to the granite slopes, the mistral wind, the particular angle of sunlight on the Hermitage hill. When you drink a good Hermitage — a Chave or a Jaboulet in a strong vintage — you're drinking something that is, in a meaningful sense, a collaboration between human intention and deep time. The vine remembers the hill. The hill remembers the Roman who first planted it.

I had a bottle of Jean-Louis Chave Hermitage 2015 on a train from Lyon to Avignon once, which is a ridiculous sentence and also entirely true. I'd bought it at a shop in the Presqu'ile and opened it with a corkscrew I keep in my travel bag for occasions exactly like this. The train followed the Rhone south, and I sat by the window watching the river and the terraced hillsides slide past, drinking a wine made from grapes grown on those same hillsides, and I thought: this is the closest I will ever come to time travel. The Romans saw this river. They planted these hills. The wine in my glass was their distant descendant, shaped by the same soil and the same sun, fermented by yeasts that have lived in those cellars for generations, bottled and carried onto a train that follows a route the Romans would have recognized.

Wine is not a metaphor for continuity. It is continuity — liquid, fermented, poured into a glass.

The Georgian qvevri tradition was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013, which is the kind of institutional recognition that simultaneously validates a practice and threatens to turn it into a museum piece. I worry about this. The qvevri method survives not because of UNESCO but because people like Giorgi keep doing it — stubbornly, without fanfare, in courtyards that will never appear in Wine Spectator. The moment it becomes primarily a heritage performance rather than a living practice, something essential is lost.

But then, wine has survived the collapse of every civilization that cultivated it. The Phoenicians are gone; their vines remain, reborn in the Bekaa Valley vineyards of modern Lebanon, where Chateau Musar produces a red blend from Cabernet Sauvignon, Cinsault, and Carignan grown at a thousand meters elevation in soils that Phoenician traders would have walked on. The Roman Empire fell; its viticultural legacy persists in every vineyard from Andalusia to the Mosel. The Georgians endured Mongol invasions, Persian conquest, Soviet collectivization — the Soviets ripped out traditional grape varieties and replanted with high-yield industrial cultivars, which is perhaps the most Soviet thing imaginable — and still the qvevri survived, kept alive in village cellars by people who were, in the most literal sense, preserving something older than their nation, older than their language, older than their alphabet.

This is what wine remembers: that civilizations are temporary but cultivation is not. That the relationship between a human being and a piece of ground, tended carefully over generations, can outlast any empire, any war, any ideology. The vine doesn't know about geopolitics. It knows about sunlight and water and soil and the patient work of roots reaching down into limestone.

On my last night in Kakheti, Giorgi's nephew drove me to a hilltop outside the village of Sighnaghi, which sits on a ridge overlooking the Alazani Valley. The sun was setting over the Caucasus mountains to the north, and the valley below was a patchwork of vineyards — Rkatsiteli, Saperavi, Mtsvane, Kisi — stretching to the horizon. It looked, in the golden late-afternoon light, like the entire valley was glowing from within.

The nephew handed me a glass of Saperavi — young, a year in the qvevri, dark as ink, almost uncomfortably tannic. He gestured at the valley and said something I've thought about many times since: “All this, because someone wanted a drink.”

He was joking, mostly. But he was also not wrong. The entire civilization of the South Caucasus — the terraced agriculture, the villages, the stone churches on hilltops, the road networks, the trade routes — all of it grew, in part, from the relationship between people and vines. Not solely. Not simply. But undeniably. Wine was not incidental to these civilizations. It was woven into their economies, their religions, their social rituals, their identities. To make wine is to commit to a place. You plant a vine, and you are saying: I will be here next year, and the year after, and the year after that. It is an act of faith in the future.

Eight thousand years of that faith, fermented and poured into a clay cup in a courtyard in eastern Georgia. I drank it. It tasted like earth and tannin and walnut skin and something older than I have words for.

Some things, you don't analyze. You just drink.