Uncorking the Past

by Patrick E. McGovern

  Proto-Indo-European (PIE) historical linguistics, albeit not a precise science, gives another perspective on tracing the ethnic origins of the plains people and their drinking habits. In an important study, Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vjačeslav Ivanov argue that the widespread occurrence of the word for wine (PIE *woi-no or *wei-no) in many ancient and modern languages (including Latin vinum, Old Irish fín, Russian vino, Early Hebrew yayin, Hittite *wijana, Egyptian *wnš, and so on) makes it an indicator of the movements of the Indo-European peoples. Although still hotly contested, an independent computer-generated study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania confirmed these reconstructions. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov placed the PIE homeland in the general region of Transcaucasia and eastern Turkey, where the Eurasian grape was probably first domesticated around 7000 B.C. With a generous margin of error, they estimated that the earliest PIE speakers started migrating around 5000 B.C. They envisioned groups, both nomadic and sedentary, spreading out toward Iran and the Central Asian oases, as well as southward to Palestine and Egypt, and westward to Europe.

  More definitive human DNA evidence for these migrations is still very limited. The few studies of Central Asian and Chinese populations that have been carried out corroborate the archaeological and linguistic scenarios of more intensive Indo-European influence before 500 B.C., which gave way to a gradually increasing influx of peoples from East Asia.

  THE ABIDING MYSTERY OF CENTRAL ASIA

  We are still very much in the dark about the dynamics of the transfer of fermented beverages and their mind-altering additives back and forth along the prehistoric Silk Road. The discoveries in Turkmenistan, in the Tarim Basin, and at Pazyryk stand as beacons that begin to illuminate how the earliest fermented beverages—such as the Jiahu grog and the resinated wines of the mountainous Near East—could have appeared at about the same time in the Neolithic period. Yet there are large geographic and temporal gaps in our knowledge. Our evidence from Gonur and Togolok goes back only as far as 2000 B.C. The Fergana Valley, whose luxuriant vines and aged wines were extolled by Strabo and Zhang Qian, remains an archaeological cipher. We are left with two choices, pending new discoveries: either knowledge of how to make a fermented beverage was developed in the Palaeolithic period and came to fruition independently at about the same time on both sides of Asia, or else the key ideas were passed along the prehistoric Silk Road in either or both directions during the “revolutionary” Neolithic period. I am more swayed by the latter hypothesis.

  We need some enterprising archaeologist to unveil what was happening at the beginning of the Neolithic period in Central Asia. An inkling of the discoveries that might emerge comes from what is perhaps the most important Neolithic site on the overland route from Iran to the great sub-continent of India: Mehrgarh in Baluchistan, Pakistan. This village of carefully planned and constructed mudbrick buildings, dating to between 7000 and 5500 B.C., has yielded archaeobotanical evidence for domesticated einkorn and emmer wheat, which must have been introduced from the Near East. Jujube (Ziziphus jujuba, also known as Chinese date) and date palm (Phoenix dactylifera) seeds were also found. Clearly, the Mehrgarh inhabitants had access to a wide range of natural products that could have been converted into alcoholic beverages. When pottery first makes its appearance around 4000 B.C., tall goblets, ideal for drinking, dominate the assemblage. The domesticated Eurasian grape appears in the archaeological record shortly thereafter and had definitely been taken into cultivation by 2500 B.C., as shown by large pieces of grapevine wood found at the site. Without carrying out chemical tests, we cannot be sure whether beers or wines were being concocted, but the existing archaeological clues are strong presumptive evidence for alcoholic beverages at the site.

  More Neolithic sites like Mehrgarh need to be discovered, excavated, and thoroughly studied across Central Asia, including sites on the side routes to India and Russia. Then we might know whether the early Neolithic fermented beverages of China and the Near East were independently developed or resulted from the mutual exchange of ideas along the prehistoric Silk Road.

  FIVE

  EUROPEAN BOGS, GROGS, BURIALS, AND BINGES

  THE WORD EUROPE FOR ME conjures up a host of fermented beverages: ruby-red clarets, luscious Champagnes, and heavenly Burgundy from France; Riesling and Nebbiolo wines from Germany and Italy; and the wonderful lambic beers, Abbey tripels, and red ales of Belgium. These drinks and many others trace their origins to medieval times.

  We owe a debt to the monastic communities of the Middle Ages for most of the European beverages we enjoy today. As well as patiently dedicating themselves to a spiritual life and preparation for the next world, the monks explored, selected, and nurtured the plant life of this world (including hops), concocted new alcoholic drinks, and made beer and wine on a large scale. In Burgundy, the Cistercian monks literally tasted the soils of the Côte d’Or and determined by a centuries-long process of trial and error, beginning in the twelfth century, which cultivars were best suited to grow on specific plots of land (terroir). They settled on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Farther north, the Trappists, an offshoot of the Cistercians, specialized in beer. Their best-known monastery and brewery, Chimay, still produces an extremely complex and aromatic ale, which can be aged for five years or more. When Tom Peters, the owner of Monk’s Café in Philadelphia, served me my first aged Chimay, I was taken aback. Could this be a beer? It had all the sensory richness—the complex aromas and flavors—of a fine wine.

  The distinctive Italian and French vermouths, which fall into the general category of mixed fermented beverages, have their roots deeper in the past. Their proprietary formulations involve macerating different tree barks and roots, orange peels, flower extracts, herbs, and spices and infusing them into wine. Vermouth derives from the German word (Wermut) for wormwood. This herb contains the world’s bitterest natural compound, α-thujone, which also has psychotropic effects.

  Such compounds, as well as others in digestives and bitters, can have longer-lasting effects, as I learned after a mishap at the Copenhagen airport in 1995. I had brought a gift for my host, John Strange: Fernet-Branca, an Italian bitter made from some forty herbs, plants, and tree resins, including saffron, rhubarb, myrrh, and cardamom. John swears by a draft of the stuff each morning before breakfast, though I can barely swallow a teaspoonful. I had carefully packed the bottle in an aluminum suitcase for protection. At the airport, the suitcase slid off the baggage cart and slammed onto the floor. A pungent brown liquid began oozing out. We quickly removed the broken bottle of Fernet-Branca and tried to clean up the mess. On the other side of customs, John met us and commiserated in the loss. After he delivered us to our accommodations, we hung up the contents of the suitcase (including my lecture notes) to dry. Years later, I can still see the brown stains along the edges of the paper and smell the presence of the bitter. A future archaeological chemist may have a field day with this beverage thousands of years from now.

  A MIXED FERMENTED BEVERAGE WITH THE “MIDAS TOUCH”

  Although the medieval period was a golden age for the development of alcoholic drinks in Europe, their history goes much further back. The Dardanelles and the Bosporus Strait, which connect the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, mark the boundary between Europe and Asia. Over the millennia, ideas and technologies have flowed constantly from one region to the other. More often, Asia has bestowed its bounty on Europe, beginning at least as early as the Neolithic period, when the Europeans began to adopt its domesticated plants and animals. On occasion, however, the process has been reversed, as when peoples of the northern European steppes penetrated into the southern lands on horseback. Fermented beverages are strongly linked with these phenomena, as they are integral to most religious, funerary, and social customs.

  The site of Gordion, near the Turkish capital of Ankara on the central Anatolian plateau, provides an entrée into the world of early European fermented beverages. Following the turbulent transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, around 1200 B.C.,
the Phrygians crossed from Eastern Europe into Asia. They were filling the vacuum left by the powerful Hittite empire, whose remnants had moved to southeastern Turkey and Syria. The Phrygians established their capital at Gordion.

  Gordion, which has been the focus of a Penn Museum excavation for more than fifty years, is renowned for the story of Alexander the Great’s neatly chopping through the enigmatic Gordian knot with his sword and fulfilling the prophecy that whoever could undo the knot would rule Asia. Legend has it that the knot firmly tethered an oxcart that had originally transported an impecunious Midas and his father Gordius to the city, thereby inaugurating a golden period of Phrygian rule.

  In Ancient Wine, I describe the stupendous royal tomb known as the Midas tumulus, dating to around 750–700 B.C. The burial chamber occupied the center of a monumental tumulus or mound, built of soil and stones piled some fifty meters high, that dominates the landscape today as in the past. Constructed of a double wall of juniper logs and cut pine planks, the tomb is the world’s oldest intact wooden structure. Located well above the water table and protected under tons of soil, it acted as a hermetically sealed time capsule.

  When excavators broke through the wall of the tomb in 1957, they came face to face with an amazing sight, like Howard Carter’s first glimpse into Tutankhamun’s tomb. They saw the body of a sixty- to sixty-five-year-old male, laid out on a thick pile of blue and purple textiles, the colors of regal splendor. In the background gleamed the largest Iron Age drinking set ever found: 157 bronze vessels, including vats, jugs, and drinking bowls, which were used in a dinner bidding farewell to the tomb’s occupant.

  Map 2 (overleaf). Europe and the Mediterranean. From 30,000 B.P. onward, traditions of fermented-beverage production penetrated into this continent and along the shores of the Earth’s largest inland sea. Domesticated plants were introduced from the Middle East during the course of the Neolithic period (beginning ca. 8500 B.C.), continuing until 4000 B.C. The Phoenicians, sailing from the Levant, and the Greeks carried their wine cultures westward across the Mediterranean. The earliest contact dates, as shown by well-attested artifacts and bioarchaeological evidence (including domesticated cereals), are tentatively indicated along the routes traveled.

  Contemporaneous Assyrian inscriptions suggest that King Midas was not only a legendary figure but really did rule Phrygia, and that he or his father or grandfather, both named Gordius, was buried in this tomb. Although no inscription conveniently proclaims “Here lies Midas,” the richness of the tomb furnishings, including some of the finest ancient inlaid furniture ever recovered, assures us that it was a royal burial. The Phrygian king’s death prompted much feasting and drinking to honor his popularity and successful reign. The body was then lowered into the tomb, along with any leftovers of the food and drink to sustain him for eternity, or at least the ensuing 2,700 years.

  If this is the burial of Midas with the legendary golden touch, where was the gold? The myth, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, might have promised unlimited riches, but it would also have condemned the king to death by starvation. When he dipped his fingers into a savory stew or sipped some wine, it was transformed into indigestible gold. Perhaps the myth was contrived by some Dark Age wanderer from Greece who caught a glimpse of the spectacular lion-headed and ram-headed bronze buckets, or situlae, in the tomb. When they were cleaned of their greenish patina, they glistened just like gold. These vessels were used to transfer a beverage from three large vats, each with a capacity of about 150 liters, to smaller vats, from which it was ladled into more than one hundred drinking bowls holding one or two liters each.

  The real gold, as far as I was concerned, was what these vessels contained. Chemical analyses of intense yellowish residues inside the situlae and bowls detected the presence of a highly unusual fermented beverage, which combined grape wine, barley beer, and honey mead. Using infrared spectrometry, gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, and other techniques, our research team identified calcium oxalate or beerstone, a marker compound for barley beer; tartaric acid and its salts, which are characteristic of grape wine in the Middle East; and honey or its fermented product, mead, based on the presence of characteristic beeswax compounds, which can never be completely filtered out of honey.

  We had discovered a truly distinctive libation that might be called “Phrygian grog.” The reader can be pardoned for cringing, as I did, at the thought of drinking such a concoction. I was so taken aback by the notion of mixing wine and beer that I issued a challenge in March 2000 to a group of imaginative microbrewers, following a “Roasting and Toasting” celebration at the Penn Museum in honor of the beer authority Michael Jackson. Their goal: carry out experiments with the ingredients identified in our chemical analyses to prove or disprove the concept of such a drink. Over the ensuing months, they tried many different permutations in the amounts and kinds of ingredients and brewing methods, not always with success. My job was to taste and assess the finished products as they arrived at my front door.

  Our chemical analysis could not resolve one crucial issue: we detected no trace of a bittering agent, but one must have been needed to offset the sweetness of the honey, grape sugar, and barley malt. Hops were ruled out, as they did not grow in Turkey at this time and were first used as a beer additive in the Middle Ages in northern Europe. We decided to use saffron, a native Turkish spice gleaned from the female stigmas of the crocus flower and suggestive of the Midas touch in both its golden color and its price. Some five thousand flowers are needed to produce a single ounce of saffron, making it the most expensive spice in the world. It has a wonderful fragrance and a distinctive, slightly bitter taste. It even has an analgesic effect. And it produced a golden color with a hint of the royal color, purple.

  Applying his Neolithic beverage-making verve, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery emerged triumphant from the microbrewers’ challenge. His creation, Midas Touch, has an affinity to Chateau Jiahu (see chapter 2), as both are mixed fermented beverages, but it has a different aromatic and taste profile and is slightly sweeter. The rice in Chateau Jiahu has been replaced in Midas Touch by malted barley, native to the Middle East. Lacking definitive evidence for which grape cultivar might have been used in eighth-century B.C. Anatolia, we used yellow Muscat, which has been shown by DNA analysis to be related to the earliest cultivated grapes in the Middle East. Combined with a delectable wildflower honey and saffron, it produced a golden-hued drink truly fit for a King.

  When Midas Touch was introduced to the world in early 2001, we were not sure that it would survive in the highly competitive beer marketplace. Dogfish Head was still struggling to avoid the fate of so many other has-been microbreweries. Midas Touch, with the golden thumbprint of the “king” embellishing its label, was first presented in 750-milliliter corked bottles. Quality was uneven, as could be seen in the variable ullage, or air space, at the top of the bottle and by corks that were often wildly askew. Although the liquid inside the bottles was delicious, Sam had never corked his beer before and needed better equipment. After one of his corkers lost a finger in the machine (which certainly belied the notion of any special touch), he changed the presentation to a four-pack of twelve-ounce bottles, which were crown-capped like most beers. Today, Midas Touch has won more prizes than any other Dogfish Head beverage, having garnered three gold medals and five silvers at major tasting competitions and captured a cult following. Midas himself could not have wished for better.

  A CONTINENT-WIDE TRADITION

  Although the Phrygian grog is a latecomer as mixed fermented or extreme beverages go, it epitomizes how traditions of beverage making could be passed back and forth between Europe and Asia and harks back to much earlier European traditions. Even before he produced his King Midas golden elixir, Sam Calagione had already dipped unwittingly into this rich heritage of European beverage making when he made a braggot to go with the dessert at the celebratory Michael Jackson dinner in 2000. Though largely forgotten today, medieval braggots combine honey, malt,
and often a fruit. Sam’s version was a lush but noncloying dessert wine to which plums had been added. By simply exchanging grapes for the plums, he had the basic formula for Midas Touch.

  Phrygian grog likely represents the traditional beverage of the Phrygian “homeland,” which immigrants brought with them on their journeys to Anatolia. It is believed that this Indo-European people originated from somewhere in the western steppe of the Ukraine and gradually made their way southwest through the Carpathian Basin environs of Hungary and Romania into the Balkans or northern Greece. The Phrygians’ ultimate origin on the steppes is borne out by a customary representation: they are shown wearing distinctive peaked hats, often made of felt, of which nearly identical examples have been recovered from the Cherchen tombs in Central Asia. Felt, which formed a thick foundation for the blue and purple textiles on which the royal body was laid out in the Midas tumulus, is a textile widely found among nomadic peoples. The material was made by compacting moistened wool into a tight roll and carrying it on horseback for days on end until the heat and friction bonded the fibers into a fabric.