Wine News off the Beaten Path

A little of this, a little of that, and nothing you’d expect in your regular news feed.

Research presented at Washington, D.C.’s American Association for the Advancement of Science conference (I know, snore, but hold on!) indicates that grape vines were cultivated nearly 11,000 years ago in the early Neolithic Age. It’s a shocker only in that previous research indicated viticulture dated about 8,500 years ago. The paper, published in Science, suggests such activity took place in Western Asia and the Caucasus. (Georgia currently holds claim to having evidence of the most ancient, continuous winemaking on earth for 8,000 years.) The paper’s authors have not concluded if the grapes were cultivated for eating or drinking, but one of them, Peter Nick of Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology told The Washington Post that the findings suggest wine’s influence was wide reaching: “It was one of the first globally traded goods. It’s justified to say that the domestication of grapevines was really one of the driving forces of civilization.”

In other ancient-drinking news, The Drinks Business, a UK-based trade publication, reports that archaeologists have dug up a 5,000-year-old pub in Iraq believed to date back to 2,700 BC. Buried just 19 inches below the surface, the discovery was part of a larger dig in an important city once known as Lagash at the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Now called Al-Hiba, the area is famed for its wealth of archaeological sites. The dig uncovered a tavern of sorts with separate seating areas, benches, an oven and refrigerator of sorts—a container designed to keep food cool). They also found bowls with remnants of fish—as one site archaeologist suggested, possibly a fish stew washed down with a pint.

Some of Brazil’s largest wine producers have been “linked to conditions analogous to slavery,” reports Meininger’s International, the German-based wine trade publication, which has been following the primary reportage in the Brazilian publication, Revistaforum.com. Three men reported deplorable conditions at Salton, Aurora and Garibaldi, major producers in Bento Gonçalves, the “wine capital” of Brazil, after being recruited by Oliveira & Santana, a contractor hired to recruit workers for the harvest. The story reports the men were recruited from the Bahia area, some 3000KM north, an area where the unemployment rates is 11% higher than the national average. The men reported ““totally unhealthy accommodation, late payment of wages, exhausting hours, physical violence, inadequate food and even false imprisonment [and constant] punishments with electric shock and pepper spray”. The workers reported 12-hour days, having to pay for the use of cutlery and even water.”

In all, more than 200 workers were reported to be part of the rescue. The companies have been suspended by ApexBrasil, the government Trade and Investment Promotion Agency, and each has issued a statement disclaiming knowledge of the alleged conditions.

Berkleyside.org, reports the death of Mark Anderson, a well-known figure in the west coast wine industry who was accused of embezzling wine clients of his wine storage facility, Sausalito Cellars, by selling some $1.2 million of wine and pocketing the money; and in 2012, sentenced for setting fire to another wine warehouse in 2005, destroying 4.5 million bottles worth more than $250 million. Sentenced to 27 years, Anderson had been granted compassionate release from Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary due to failing health. He died five months after that release on Jan. 13, the website reported this week. Anderson was the subject of a 2015 book, Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California.

A Scottish fragrance brand, Jorum Studio, has created a new scent that will appeal to lovers of whisky, distillers and barrel aficionados. Called “Spiritcask,” the fragrance was designed to smell like “sticking your head inside an empty whisky cask,” The Drinks Business reported earlier this month. Perfumer Euan McCall told the magazine that he wanted to focus on the specific smell of the cask itself, with its residual aromas of the spirit mixed with the wood itself. Spiritcask in the third such Scottish whisky-inspired fragrance from the studio, joining Firewater, a peat and maritime profile derived from Jura and Islay malts; and Arborist, inspired by Scotland’s Highland region.