Common Ground is that wonderful place where most people would congregate if it were nearby, that place where common sense and common decency would unite and embrace. It is the place, clearly violated, in the widely seen photo of four armed French police, surrounding a Muslim woman sitting on a beach with her children, forcing her to eliminate part of her clothing because it somehow presented a security risk. By focusing on security, the French are giving up other equally valuable conditions for civil life, like fairness and, yes, common sense. Today, wine consumption is subject to the same extremist mandates.
Abuse is a legitimate concern, of course, but we give up too much when we focus on abuse alone, or worse, fear of abuse, just as we do when we focus on security alone.
Health authorities and others are so obsessed by addiction that they ignore the common ground, that the use and enjoyment of alcohol has ancient roots as deep as the history of humans. When consumed in a responsible way, alcohol validates our humanity.
After each yearly physical, my doctor admonishes me for drinking two glasses of wine a day instead of the recommended one glass for women. Two glasses of wine a day is not ”too much” by any sensible definition. My doctor admits that she never drinks alcohol and that, statistically, her risk factors are the same as mine, according to prevailing research, which is just that, prevailing, and that means that it could change after the next new study.
I recently read an article in National Geographic of all places, not Wine Spectator or any other wine periodical. The journalist questioned Dr. Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, asking him why he brewed ancient beers.
“We were born to drink—first milk, then fermented beverages.” (What about water?) “Our sensory organs attract us to them. As humans came out of Africa, they developed these from what they grew. In the Middle East, it was barley and wheat. In China, rice and sorghum. Alcohol is central to human culture and biology.”
Dr. McGovern goes on to say, “Anthropologists debate which came first, bread or beer. I think it was beer: It’s easier to make, more nutritious, and has a mind-altering effect. These were incentives for hunter-gathers to settle down and domesticate grain. In the process, they set up the first permanent villages and broke down social boundaries between groups. Most of the world’s religions use alcohol, and the earliest medicines involve wine. The beginnings of civilization were spurred on by fermented beverages.”
In a world of slipping “common ground” and diminishing “common sense,” McGovern reminds us that humans have been consuming alcohol for as long as they have been human. And to make policy on either a community or personal level based on abuse ignores the satisfaction and pleasure that we take from moderate consumption. And always have. Cheers!
How Archaeologists Find a Drink That Evaporated
The claim that people were fermenting beverages thousands of years ago rests on chemistry rather than on written records. Residues soak into the porous walls of unglazed pottery and stay there, and modern instruments can identify the compounds left behind long after the liquid itself is gone.
Tartaric acid is the useful marker for grape wine, since it occurs in significant quantity in few other fruits available to early Eurasian communities. Other residues point toward honey, rice, barley, or tree resins added as preservatives and flavoring.
This kind of work is done in laboratories attached to museum collections, where the vessels themselves are held. The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, better known as the Penn Museum, is one of the institutions where such analysis has been carried out.
| Region | Principal ingredients | Resulting drink |
|---|---|---|
| Near East | Barley and wheat | Beer, alongside grape wine where vines grew |
| Caucasus and Zagros | Wild and early cultivated grapes | Wine, stored in large clay vessels |
| Neolithic China | Rice, honey, and fruit | A mixed fermented beverage |
| Northern Europe | Grain, honey, and berries | Ale and mead-like drinks |
The Argument About Bread and Beer
The question of whether grain was first domesticated for bread or for beer is a genuine scholarly debate rather than a provocation. Both require the same crop, the same storage, and the same settled labor, and the archaeological record does not obviously favor one use over the other.
The case for beer rests on nutrition and preservation. Fermentation makes some nutrients more available, produces a liquid safer than untreated water, and yields something that keeps, all of which are strong incentives for a group deciding whether to stay in one place through a season.
Whichever came first, the two arrived together in practice. A community that could store grain could make both, and the same surplus that supported bread supported brewing.
Why Fermentation Was Everywhere
The near-universality of fermented drinks across unrelated cultures is easier to explain than it first appears. Fermentation happens without human intervention wherever sugar meets wild yeast, so every society that stored fruit or grain encountered it, and the ones that learned to control it gained something valuable.
What it produced was not only intoxication. It preserved a perishable harvest, made contaminated water safer, supplied calories, and created a substance suitable for ritual precisely because it was set apart from ordinary food and drink.
Those functions explain why alcohol became embedded in religion, medicine, hospitality, and law rather than remaining a private pleasure. The pattern shows up wherever agriculture does, which is a strong hint about its usefulness.
Domestication followed rather than preceded the habit. People were making fermented drinks from wild fruit and grain long before either was cultivated deliberately, which suggests the plant was valued first and farmed afterward.
Evidence That Keeps Moving
The point about prevailing research deserves emphasis, because guidance on consumption has changed repeatedly within living memory and rests on studies that are difficult to conduct well. Most of what is known comes from observational work, where people who choose to drink differ from those who do not in many ways besides drinking.
Randomized trials of long-term consumption are effectively impossible to run, so the evidence base remains indirect, and reasonable researchers reach different conclusions from the same data. Recommendations issued as settled fact are therefore best read as current best estimates.
None of that resolves the individual question, which depends on health history, medication, and circumstance, and belongs with a physician rather than with an article. What it does suggest is a certain humility about confident pronouncements in either direction, a theme our hot topics archive returns to often.
Alcohol and Human History FAQ
How old is the earliest chemical evidence for fermented drink?
Residue analysis has pushed it back into the Neolithic period, thousands of years before writing. Dates are revised as techniques improve and as older vessels are tested, so any specific figure is provisional.
Was ancient wine anything like modern wine?
Not particularly. It was frequently flavored with resins, herbs, or honey, often unstable, and commonly diluted before drinking, since it functioned as food and medicine as much as a beverage.
Why does wine feature so heavily in ritual?
Because it was scarce, transformative, and required knowledge to produce, which is a reliable recipe for ceremonial significance. That inheritance is still visible in how bottles are opened at weddings and anniversaries, a subject taken up in our guide to wine for celebrations, and in the vocabulary covered in our notes on wine skills and knowledge.