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Vineyards in Diyarbarkir, Turkey, an ancient winemaking region

New research suggests the home of wine is Turkey.

There are easier places to make wine than the spectacular, desolate landscapes of southeast Turkey, but DNA analysis suggests it is here that Stone Age farmers first domesticated the wine grape.

Today, Turkey is home to archaeological sites, as well as vineyards of ancient grape varieties such as bogazkere and öküzgözü. It was these that drew the curiosity of Swiss botanist and grape DNA sleuth Jose Vouillamoz, for the clues they may offer to the origins of European wine.

Together with American biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern, Vouillamoz has spent nearly a decade studying the world's cultivated and wild vines.

"We wanted to collect samples from wild and cultivated grape vines from the Near East – that means southeastern Anatolia, Armenia and Georgia," he explained. Their aim was "to see in which place the wild grape was, genetically speaking, linked the closest to the cultivated variety."

Speaking at the European Wines Bloggers' conference in the Turkish city of Izmir this month, Vouillamoz revealed that "it turned out to be southeastern Anatolia" – the Asian part of modern Turkey. "We propose the hypothesis that it is most likely the first place of grape-vine domestication."

McGovern's laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania Museum also provided archaeological evidence of wine's Anatolian roots after analyzing residues of liquid recovered from vessels thousands of years old.

McGovern, who is the author of two books on the history of fermented beverages – "Uncorking the Past" and "Ancient Wine: the Search for the Origins of Viniculture" – used a sensitive chemical technique to look for significant amounts of tartaric acid; grapes are its only source in the Middle East.

While Georgia, Armenia and Iran all played a role in ancient winemaking, preliminary evidence from pottery and even older clay mineral containers seems to place the very first domestication of the wild Eurasian grape Vitis vinifera in southeastern Anatolia between 5,000 and 8,500 BC, McGovern said.

Southeastern Anatolia is part of the Fertile Crescent, the name given to a vast area stretching through modern-day Iraq and Iran to the Nile Valley in the south. It's widely seen as the birthplace of the eight so-called "founder" crops – from chickpea to barley – that are the world's first known domesticated plants.

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Grapes growing in the ancient wine region of Diyarbarkir; the grape harvest in Murefte, west of Istanbul

Evidence found by the research duo suggests that for wine, too, hundreds of today's grapes find their roots in "founder" varieties descended from the wild grapes of the region.

Through DNA profiling, Vouillamoz says he has isolated 13 of these "founder" grapes by tracing the family trees of European fine-wine grapes. He believes farmers across southeastern Anatolia or the Near East started domesticating the wild Vitis vinifera grape around the same time – giving rise to the 13 founders.

If this is true, it debunks the long-held notion that most Western European grapes were introduced independently from the Middle East, Near East or Egypt, Turkey or Greece, at different times and in different places.

Standing in a gully between Elazig and Diyarbakir, Daniel O'Donnell, chief winemaker at the Turkish winery Kayra, gestured to the great expanse of mountains where wild grape vines still grow in gullies and washes.

"It is a wine-making pilgrimage to come back here and find, genetically, 8,000- to 9,000-year-old vines," said O'Donnell, who arrived here from California in 2006. "It's mind-blowing to be a Napa guy paying attention to the fine details, the minutiae of wine making, and come here."

But this heritage is now under threat.

In the Kurdish Diyarbakir region, where women on subsistence farms tend the vines and goats do the pruning, phylloxera is killing vineyards that have not been grafted onto disease-resistant rootstock.

"Unfortunately, phylloxera has arrived here. Every year we see the vines die," explained Murat Uner, wine production manager at Kayra.

Phylloxera annihilated vineyards in Europe in the late-19th century. Wild vines are somewhat protected by their eco system, but cultivated vines are extremely vulnerable. "We explain it, but they [local grape growers] don't want to listen," says Uner.

The frustration is shared by winemakers who are trying to develop the Turkish wine industry, and experts who fear the loss of an irreplaceable genetic diversity within these ancient varieties.

"They are incredibly lucky to have this," said Vouillamoz. "It has been lost in many places."