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February 17, 2007
Should We Call it the Wine Age?
Andresky of the Northwest Herald writes in his article "Muscat love: Ancient grape's ancestors can be found all over the world,"
Muscat is a grape that's hard to describe.Almost every great wine region in the world has some of its vines. Surprisingly, it makes a wine that actually tastes like ripe grapes. Its musk-like smell is the root of part of its name, and most table raisins come from its vine. More than 250 variations of muscat exist today.
Muscat is an ancient grapevine. Many molecular archeologists consider it to be the progenitor to all domestic grapes. The bridge between wild grapes and domesticated ones can be roughly calculated to somewhere between 1000 to 800 B.C.
Back then, Phoenicians lived along the Mediterranean Sea in what is now Lebanon, Syria and Israel. As sea-farers, Phoenicians carried wine to many points past Gibraltar, such as Cornwall and the west coast of Africa. The Phoenicians and their ancestors, the Canaanites, were responsible for transmitting the alphabet, arts and a wine culture. Their wine was known as "grape of the bees." It had a peculiar musk aroma and was believed to be muscat. [emphasis added]
Please read the whole article.
There is an interesting issue with regard to the sentence that I highlighted above. People were making and drinking wine for a very long time before the Iron Age. There is clear evidence of wine residue in several Neolithic jars from Hajji Firuz Tepe Iran. Patrick McGovern of Princeton's Applied Science Center for Archaeology, based on DNA analysis, believes that the grapes used in Neolithic wine was already domesticated. In other words, the DNA of Neolithic grape residue is related to but demonstrably different from modern wild strains and some of those differences can be seen in domestic grapes today. Now it is possible that the predecessor of modern muscat grapes was not domesticated until the Iron Age but if so Andresky's statement is a little too broad for my taste.
Also, I may be wrong about this but I think the earliest attestation of the muscat grape being called the "grape of the bees" is from Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), who lived in the first century CE. He said, "uva quam Graeci psithiam vocant, nos apianam" (Naturalis Historia. XIV, 11). I worry that Andresky got his history wrong on both ends.
Via PaleoJudaica
Posted by Duane Smith at February 17, 2007 11:24 AM | Read more on Archaeology |
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