It’s nice when things connect. There was a press release last week on the earliest known winery being found in Armenia. The paper is Chemical evidence for wine production around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern highlands. Alas, it’s not Open Access so if you want to read it can you can’t use a library or blag a copy it’ll be expensive. It was covered in other blogs, so I wouldn’t normally mention it.
Meanwhile another release has come out about some genetic work on grapes in PNAS. I found this while working on AoB Blog. Genetic structure and domestication history of the grape is open access, but you’ll have to do a search on the title as the DOI isn’t working (as I write this). This dates the domestication of grapes to no later than 5,000 years ago – and the likely centre of domestication is the region between the Black Sea and Caspian Seas.
After much fiddling about I’ve managed to set up a map on AoB Blog showing where the winery is. You can decide for yourself if the two approaches are coming to the same location for the origin of wine.