In 1968, while excavating a 7,000-year-old Neolithic farming village in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iran, archeologist Mary Voigt of the College of William and Mary found six large clay jars in the kitchen of a mud-brick dwelling. The shape of the jars, long-necked and narrow- mouthed, suggested they had once contained a liquid--around two and a half gallons of it. Voigt thought the yellowish residue in one jar might be milk or yogurt. But nothing much came of that hunch, and the jars were filed away in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
There they remained until June 1996, when Patrick McGovern, an archeological chemist at the museum, subjected the residue to chemical analysis and found that it was not yogurt but wine--the oldest wine yet discovered. McGovern detected the telltale presence of tartaric acid, which is found in large quantities only in grapes, as well ...
