Archeologists digging in the Negev desert in southern Israel have uncovered evidence of a booming wine industry dating back more than 1,500 years. They have also found and genetically analyzed two ancient winegrape varieties that thrived in the hot, dry climate of the region. Some members of Israel’s young wine industry hope to use the grapes to produce wines with a link to the region’s long history.
Napa for the Byzantine Empire?
Prof. Guy Bar-Oz is a bio-archaeologist at the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa who began digging in the region in 2015 and at the Avdat archaeological site in 2018. His goal was to find out why the people who lived there 1,500 years ago abandoned the region. His early excavations focused on middens, ancient trash piles. He and his colleagues were surprised by how many grape pips they dug up.
The ancient city of Avdah (or Abdah) was founded in the 1st century BCE by the Nabataeans, a people who ruled parts of modern-day Israel, Jordan and Syria. They are best known for building the ancient city of Petra, their capital, and were neighbors of ancient Judea. Avdah was an important town between Petra and Gaza, part of a trade route for spices. Later, the Nabataeans’ land was absorbed into the Roman and then Byzantine empires. The region has strong links to our collective wine past.
By 600 CE, the population living in Avdat were Greek speakers and Christian. They lived on the eastern edge of the vast Byzantine empire, which controlled much of the land touching the Mediterranean sea. The hinterlands of Gaza were used for agriculture, and these vintners had access to the trade routes of the empire and the kingdoms in what is today Western Europe. Adding to their good fortune, Jerusalem was a busy pilgrimage destination, bringing visitors from all over. In other words, it was a good market for wine.
The evidence for commercial wine production in the area is persuasive. Archeologists have uncovered large wine presses, the remains of pressed grapes, dovecotes positioned to provide guano to fertilize the vines, the traces of irrigation systems—everything necessary to prosper at viticulture in a marginal environment.
“They didn’t have enough water so they built water systems to collect water during the winter,” said Dr. Meirav Meiri, curator of Bioarcheology and Head of the Animal and Plant Ancient DNA Laboratory at the Steinhardt Museum in Tel Aviv, who worked on the research. “From these sites we can see that the people who lived there knew how to take advantage of what they had to have a successful life.”
Ancient grapes
The researchers decided they needed to learn more about the grape remains they found. “We wanted to know what varieties they grew,” said Meiri. “Did they bring them from somewhere else in the Byzantine empire or Europe, or were they local varieties?”
Over the last few decades the Negev has become trendy place to plant a vineyard, but the vines are international varieties like Cabernet Sauvignon. The ancient varieties have been lost.
The archeological team gathered grape pips from three sites and used target-enriched genomic-wide sequencing and radiocarbon dating to determine the grapes’ lineage. They also sequenced modern indigenous cultivars as well as wild and feral grapes gathered across Israel.
They found that the Byzantine farmers grew numerous, genetically diverse grapes in field blends. “Maybe this diversity [in the vineyards] was a strategy for food security,” said Bar-Oz. Different varieties might have been more resistant to disease or drought, ripen earlier or later. “And if they all ripen on the same day, you’ll have problems bringing them to the wine press.”
Two pips were of particular interest. A33 is a direct relative, likely a parent-offspring relationship, of the modern Lebanese grape Asswad Karech, also known as Syriki in Greece. “It’s amazing,” said Meiri. “It has many names, but it’s the same variety, and it’s still growing in the region, but not in Israel.”
Another pip, A32, is the oldest white wine grape identified so far. And some think it could be a link to a legendary white wine of Gaza. There are literary references in Europe, from the fifth and sixth centuries, extolling the quality of a sweet white wine, Vinum Gazum or Gaza wine. Wine was known by its port of origin, and the amphorae used to ship the wine would have been unique to that region.
But experts don’t know for sure where the Gaza merchants sourced their wine. Avdah was on the trade route to Gaza and the port would have been a two-day walk from the Negev vineyards. The archeologists know that wine for export was carried by camel in elongated amphorae, easily stacked, then shipped by sea. Wine for local and regional consumption was stored in smaller, round vessels. Significant quantities of shards from Gaza amphorae have been found in Western Europe and the British Isles. But after the sixth century, the luxury elixir disappears from records.
Pip A32 was discovered in a sealed room in a Byzantine monastery, dating to the eight century. That’s after the heyday of Gaza wine production, which ended mysteriously two hundred years earlier. Christian monasteries remained and they produced wine for their own consumption. Could the monks have kept the famous Gaza wine growing through the centuries of political, economic and social upheaval?
A mysterious end
The evidence shows that for two centuries, the winemakers enjoyed a boom economy. And suddenly they didn’t. But the reason for the collapse of the once flourishing wine industry remains a mystery.
“We could see from the way the houses were built that they meant to stay forever, but something went wrong,” said Bar-Oz. “What happened?”
One theory lays the blame on the Muslim conquest, around 640 CE, but carbon dating reveals that wine production largely dried up more than 100 years earlier. Archeologists found houses had been sealed with stones, methodically, with care, as if to protect them until their owners returned.
Two other theories—climate change and the plague—were also explored. From the evidence found at the three sites, it does not appear that either pushed this wine-centric society to collapse. The reason was probably economic. It was a time of upheaval, and the empire’s eastern territories, which relied on Byzantine globalization, may have lost their export markets, leading to a collapse in the local economy. “The facts tell a complex story,” said Bar-Oz.
But soon it could be possible to taste an authentic Negev wine from ancient grapes, possibly even the legendary white wine of Gaza. A research grant has helped propagate the two ancient grapes and plant five acres in the Negev highlands, bringing the ancient Byzantine vineyards to the 21st century. The researchers plan to begin planting the vineyard in September.