Significance: The earliest biomolecular archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence for grape wine and viniculture from the Near East, ca. 6,000–5,800 BC during the early Neolithic Period, was obtained by applying state-of-the-art archaeological, archaeobotanical, climatic, and chemical methods to newly excavated materials from two sites in Georgia in the South Caucasus. Wine is central to civilization as we know it in the West. As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance, and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies, and society in the ancient Near East. This wine culture subsequently spread around the globe. Viniculture illustrates human ingenuity in developing horticultural and winemaking techniques, such as domestication, propagation, selection of desirable traits, wine presses, suitable containers and closures, and so on.

Comparable to Drieu et al.’s viewpoint, we argue that it is possible to identify ancient Eurasian grape wine by current biomolecular methods, but only in conjunction with the relevant archaeological, archaeobotanical, and other natural and social scientific data. Additionally, we advocate an inductive–deductive working hypothesis model, which is appropriate for the “historical science” of archaeology. We focus on two key deficiencies of Drieu et al.’s argumentation: (1) the assumption that Guasch-Jané et al. (2004) extracted their ancient samples with potassium hydroxide before testing for tartaric acid/tartrate, and (2) the supposition that 5000-year-old yeast DNA would not be preserved in the hot climate of Egypt but rather represents modern contamination.

Vegetative propagation methods involve using mature plant material to produce new plants. It probably contributed to the key transition for early humans from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to settled agricultural communities based on cultivating their plant resources. The domestication of the Eurasian grapevine can be described as a long-term process of selection of suitable genotypes followed by their vegetative propagation. Vegetative propagation through cuttings is one of the earliest known agricultural practices, and historical sources substantiate its widespread use for the cultivation of the Eurasian grapevine. To test whether domestication has had an effect on the grapevine’s capacity for rooting and therefore vegetative propagation, 1,061 grapevine cuttings from nine different accessions were studied for 200 days in two different experimental sites in Georgia. Specifically, the vegetative propagation properties of 485 cuttings of the wild vine (Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris) were compared with 576 cuttings of the domesticated vine (Vitis vinifera subsp. sativa). Subspecies sativa showed a higher rooting ability than subspecies sylvestris. The domesticated plant also showed a more developed root system characterised by a greater number of first- and second-order roots. Moreover, the domesticated cuttings showed a larger single leaf area, whereas wild cuttings produced more nodes and leaves. The total leaf area for the two subspecies was similar. We propose that the greater rooting ability of the subspecies sativa was likely a key character that was selected for during the domestication process, whether more or less consciously. These results provide concrete support for the hypothesis that asexual reproduction plays an important role in the domestication process.