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The Greeks domesticated grapevines around 4000 years ago, according to a comparison of ancient seeds discovered in archaeological excavations.

We know that people began making wine by fermenting wild-picked grapes before the fruit was domesticated 鈥� in Greece, some of the earliest evidence of wine-making, in the form of grape residues in pottery, dates back to at least 4300 BC 鈥� but now researchers have found that by around 2000 BC, people in central Greece had already begun to develop a finer taste for wine.

鈥淭his means that people knew better how to select grapevines. They knew which grapes could make good wine,鈥� says Clemence Pagnoux at the French School of Athens, Greece.

Pagnoux and her colleagues gathered more than 2000 preserved grape seeds from different sites around Greece, with the oldest dating to roughly 5500 BC.

They took detailed pictures of the seeds and compared their shapes. A tell-tale sign of domestication is when seeds from a certain place and time become more uniform, indicating that growers have begun to select specific grapes and propagate them. The researchers found this occurred in central Greece between 2100 and 1700 BC.

These dates fall solidly in the middle Bronze Age, when the Greeks were trading in wine and olive oil. It makes sense that grape growers would become more interested in stabilising their product and focusing on quality.

More varieties of domesticated seeds began to appear by 1500 BC, Pagnoux says, during the late Bronze Age. 鈥淚 think grapevines became widely cultivated during this period and they selected a lot of new varieties,鈥� she says.

The findings suggest that central Greece has some of the earliest evidence of grape domestication, but Pagnoux is careful to note that seeds in many other ancient wine-making regions in the Middle East haven鈥檛 yet been analysed in this way and could reveal older dates. As trade between Greece and the Middle East flourished at this time, the domesticated seeds found in central Greece may even have been imported, she says.

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