Ancient Israeli winemaking was among the most developed in the world, until the 7th century, when alcohol fell out of favor following the Islamic conquest. For that reason, many of the surviving domesticated grape cultivars in Israel are for table grapes, which were selected for things such as large berry size, high sugar, long shelf life, and delicate skin. Wine grapes generally have higher acid, and attributes such as berry size, shelf life, and skin toughness do not matter.
Because of the decline in wine production during the Islamic period, the cultivation of grapes used for making wine in ancient times tapered off. This means today’s wild grape varieties are the most genetically similar to the types of grapes grown for ancient wine. Drori hopes it’s only a matter of time before he finds a wild grape with closely matching DNA to the grapes found in archaeological digs.
Each grape variety has a unique seed structure, like a thumbprint, that can be mapped, explained Drori. Any excavated grape seed that is larger than five milliliters can be scanned by high-powered microscopes to see if a match can be identified with modern counterparts. So far, Drori’s lab has scanned 20 seeds from archaeological digs.
The biggest haul of ancient material came from archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who excavated at the Ophel, between the City of David and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
“She called me one day and said, ‘I have three kilos of grapes,’” Drori recalled. “I said, you mean seeds? And she said, ‘No, three kilos of grapes.’ I dropped everything and ran to her lab. They found a big pot, maybe a wine jar used for fermentation. They also found a very nice inscription on it that says ‘smooth wine’ so we know what it was for.” The dried berries dated to around the 10th century BCE, said Drori.
Massive DNA study of over 3,500 wild and domesticated grapevines overturns what historians thought they knew about the first cultivation of grapes and wine
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