Historians and investigators have found difficulties to determine exact dates in the culture of wine in former times. It?s not known the exact place where men started to domesticate the culture of  vineyards, but it surely ocurred when in the past a prehistoric ancestor was lucky enough to find a grape raceme, to press it and not to drink it immediately, so it must have fermented. From this moment onwards the art of wine was born.
In any case, the step from a wild vineyard to a cultivated one, in the origins of human history is still a mistery today. But besides myths and legends.

There is no doubt that this mutation was the result of man?s work, a progressive work, done throughout the years, until hermaphrodite vineyards were obtained through continuous mutations and selections, that offered less difficulties than the wild vineyards, that were mostly of different sex.
Some historians think that men knew the wine before learning to cultivate the grapes, possibly  since the gender “vitis”, that includes all domestic vineyards, appeared in the Tertiary Era. Nobody knows when this ocurred, but some  stocks archeological rests have been found and they could help us to think about a possible date. A more than 50 million old fosill stock is known, the “Vitis Sezanensis”, found in the Champagne area in France and it seems to be similar to a variety cultivated nowadays in California. Twelve million years ago, before men appeared, during the Plyocen, varios sorts of “vitis” developped, we can name: The “Vitis Ausoniae”, and the “Vitis Vinifera selvatica or labrusca”, that can still be found in semitropical forests in the United States (Carolina nd Mississipi).



Rests of wild vineyards have been found in the centre of France, in the south west of Swisszerland , in the Upper Rhine, in the river Danube, in Ukraine and in Spain. The “Vitis labrusca” is still cultivated in the north east of the United States, in Colombia, Brasil, Swisszerland, northen Italy and in some regions of Africa and Asia. Among the specimen “wild vineyard” the so called “cucasic” dominated in Asia Minor, where till recent times the vintage of this sort was still carried out.

As far as the use of these vineyards to elaborate wine, we have to know to start with that anthropologists agree that the drinks fermented wit fruits(blacberries, pears) or corn seeds were already known about a hundred thousand years ago by the first inhabitants of the world. Nevertheless this system was improved by the Cro- magnon men and by the inhabitants of the first settlements, about eight thousand years ago.

Although it cannot be assured that the Middle Orient have been the craddle of domesticated vineyards, meaning the “Vitis vinifera silvestris”survived the glacial era between the Caspian sea and the Persic Gulf. From this plant derive three very important specimen: “the Vitis  vinifera pontica” from Mesopotamia, Armenien and Asia Minor, that was brought to Europe by the Phoenicians and gave origin to some of  the actual white vineyards; the “Vitis vinifera occidentalis”, cultivated on the banks of the river Nile, that is the mother of the “pinot noir; and the “Vitis vinifera orientalis”, cultivated in the Jordan valley, that could be the ancestor of the “chasselas stock”.