Today France or Italy are considered centers of viticulture, but the roots of the wine are not in Europe, but in Asia. In China, archaeological finds and historical records show that alcoholic beverages were made from grapes as early as 9000 years ago. Long before the Silk Road was established, this drink and its raw materials were also sought-after exchange and trade goods.
Alcoholic beverages are not only luxury foods, they also played an important role in the culture and religion of early civilizations thousands of years ago. The semi-sedentary people of the Natufien culture in the Middle East brewed a kind of beer made from wild grain and other plant additives 13,000 years ago. In contrast, 5000-year-old finds of brewing utensils and mash residues in northern China testify to the advanced brewing art.
Mix of beer, wine and mead
But what about the wine – after all, one of the most drunk alcoholic drinks of today? “Alcohol and especially grape wine played a very important role on the Eurasian continent for thousands of years,” explains Peter Kupfer, Sinologist from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “The emergence of all Eurasian civilizations is closely linked to the development of an initially magical and later socially religious ritualized wine and alcohol culture.” The scientist has been researching the origins and development of wine culture in China for around 40 years and now has his knowledge in summarized in a book.
According to copper, it is probably not beer, but wine that is the oldest and most widespread cultural and ritual drink of mankind. Evidence for this is provided by finds from Jiahu in the northern Chinese province of Henan. There in 2004 archaeologists led by Patrick McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania discovered vessels from around 7000 BC in which residues of a fermented drink were preserved. Further analysis revealed that this drink was a mixture of beer, wine and mead. It was made with grapes, rice, honey and certain mushroom cultures. A little later, around 8000 years ago, wine-growing began in Georgia, as archaeological finds suggest.
Nomadic tribes as “development workers”
It is no coincidence that the possibly oldest wine in the world was found in China, of course, as copper explains. Because in this region the greatest variety and density of wild wine types grew at that time. Even today, there are more than 40 wild vitis species in China, including 30 originally native species. China’s early wine production experienced a strong upswing, especially during the Bronze Age, when members of the nomadic Rong and Di tribes invaded China from what is now Iran. “These tribes brought their viticulture and wine arts from central Asia and ancient Persia to northern China, where they began to cultivate and trade wine,” reports Kupfer.
Subsequently, knowledge of viticulture and winemaking was spread to other areas in China and Eurasia. Not only since the flowering of the Silk Road two thousand years ago, but already since prehistoric times, the Eurasian societies have kept in contact and exchanged over huge geographical distances – also about the best methods of producing alcoholic beverages. It is not yet known whether there was a direct connection between the sites of the earliest evidence of wine production in China and Georgia. According to copper, this is quite possible.
Drink of heaven
On the other hand, it is clear that alcohol has played an important role in Chinese culture over the millennia. Especially from the Zhou dynasty around 1100 BC. Chr. Alcohol was considered a drink of heaven. “The idea was that alcohol is a cosmic and universal phenomenon that has its origin in heaven,” explains Kupfer. In turn, people were given the choice of how to use alcohol. Confucianism also took up this idea. “Even today, people in China still toast themselves as prescribed 3000 years ago in written instructions about hospitality,” explains Kupfer.
Source: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; Book: “Amber Shine and Pearls of the Black Dragon: The History of Chinese Wine Culture”; ISBN-13: 978-3-946114-28-4