🍷 Hajji Firuz Tepe

Hajji Firuz Tepe is an ancient Neolithic settlement in north-west Iran, not far from Lake Urmia. It was excavated in the 1960s. It is famous for a find tied to the history of wine. In one of the rooms, large clay jars were found. On the inner walls of one of them a yellow residue was discovered. Analysis showed that the jar had held wine made from grapes, to which terebinth tree resin had been added. The find is dated to roughly 5400 to 5000 BC. For a long time these were among the earliest known traces of winemaking. The resin may have served as a preservative, keeping the wine from turning to vinegar. So two old practices meet in this wine: the vessel and the resin, from which a tradition of resinated wines later grew. The settlement lies in the Near East, and the find shows that people in this region knew wine thousands of years ago. It is an important point in the history of wine, but not the only one: similar traces have been found in Georgia.