The great epic of wine making, based first on a wild vineyard and then little by little on a cultivated one, it seems to have started in Asia Minor and in Orient, about the year 6.000 before Christ, more precissely in the region of Mount Ararat, in Caucasia, an area shared by Iran,Turkey and Armenien nowadays. Some linguistic data support this theory.

The word wine has its origin in the Caucasian word “voino”, that meant something like: grape poisoning drink. The word was accepted and modified and it extended in old times as: “oinos”and “woinos” for the Greek: “vinum” for the Romans. On the other hand, in the Bible a certain number of paragraphs refer to wine. In one of them refers to what it could be the oldest viticulture center in the world, where Noah planted the first vineyard in the place where the monastery of Etshmiadsin is situated. The Bible mentions in the Genesis that Noah, farmer, started to farm the land and planted a vineyard, drunk his wine and got drunk.

The relationship between wine and religion has been very close from the very beginning. Further on in the New Testament, the wine became a great religious symbol with the beginning of Christianism. The transformation from water into wine in the Cana weddings was Christ?s first miracle. Later on his words in The Last Supper of stamped the symbolism of wine in the central mistery of Christianism: “ Take and drink, because this is my blood, that will be flown out for all of you and for all mankind to redeem your sinns”.

These are the hypotheses that have been traditionally considered as valid, but as it occurs with many social sciences, new findings can give a Copernican turn to the conceptual diagram built upon pieces of evidence discovered until now. The recent finding in the archeological rests of Cantorroano (Extremadura, Spain) could mean a revolution in the historical viticulture thesis considered valid until now. The archeological rests consist
of some libation glasses that are still being studied, but if the hypotheses of the experts are confirmed, they could mean the confirmation that men knew rudimentary fermentation techniques since far longer ago that what it has been beleived until now.