Is this really news? 1000 year old vineyards found in Spain.

WINE TALK
1

I would think there are many much older, no?

http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/thousand-year-old-vineyard-found-in-spain-121228.htm

2

If, as many people believe, the Phoenicians introduced grapes to Spain, there would be vineyards dating back maybe 1000 BC. I’ve visited some ancient sites in south Spain, but there aren’t vines growing any more.

In Hungary, there are some vineyards still in production that were written about in 900 AD. They are much older than that, but there’s no known written description of them that is earlier. Those are the oldest continually-cultivated vineyards I know of, but I’m sure there are older ones elsewhere.

I think this is a big deal mostly for the Basques. And it’s kind of cool on its own.

3

The ancient history of the Basques is one of the mostly hotly debated topics in all of applied genetics:

4

Mastroberadino makes a tiny amount of wine from vineyards inside the walls of Pompeii, just outside the Coliseum. The theory is that it supplied some of the wines used by the spectators to quench their thirst after all the blood letting. Mastroberadino did a lot of research when they replanted the grapes, and from memory, ended up planting a few more recent varieties to make the wines taste better.

5

Greg:

I believe this story is about having found evidence of ancient vineyards, not present-day operational vineyards dating from 1,000 years ago. In any case, it is a big deal for the Basque region, and cool too.

My knowledge of the history has the Phoenicians planting vineyards in Andalusia around 1100 BC.

6

And in linguistics as well. Basque is a language isolate, the last remnant of pre-Indo-European language in Europe, it is so far removed from Indo-European that comparative methods can not be used to reconstruct its history.

7

I once had a doctor who was of Basque origin. He told me that, like Armenians, whose surnames mostly end in ian, Basque surnames often end in aria.

To me, that is a fascinating piece of information that says something about historical insularity.

8

And Bretons often have names ending in -ec. People haven’t started moving that much since quite recently.

I’m not sure why this vineyard discovery is big news for anybody except the Basques themselves (assuming they don’t find an excuse in it to kill a few more people). It’s quite clear that the Romans had planted vineyards all over their Empire. I heard the vineyards in Côte-Rôtie date back from this period, and there must be some as old as that in Languedoc too, as well as several parts of Spain…