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E-mail: mcgovern sas. Edited by Dolores R. Author contributions: P. Chemical analyses of ancient organic compounds absorbed into the pottery fabrics of imported Etruscan amphoras ca. The data support the hypothesis that export of wine by ship from Etruria in central Italy to southern Mediterranean France fueled an ever-growing market and interest in wine there, which, in turn, as evidenced by the winepress, led to transplantation of the Eurasian grapevine and the beginning of a Celtic industry in France.
Herbal and pine resin additives to the Etruscan wine point to the medicinal role of wine in antiquity, as well as a means of preserving it during marine transport. Keywords: ancient medicine, biomolecular archaeology, viticulture, Western Mediterranean. Much is already known about the initial domestication of the Eurasian grapevine Vitis vinifera sp. Less is known about how viniculture moved from east to west across the Mediterranean Sea, eventually reaching Italy and France.
Merchant seafarers, including Canaanites and later Phoenicians and Greeks, were the principal conveyors, who progressively established colonies along the coasts and on one island after another. By at least B. The Phoenician amphora Fig. Drawings by B. Such wine amphoras eventually filled the holds of Etruscan ships, some of which sank along the Italian and French coasts on their way to southern Mediterranean France, beginning ca.
On land, the Celts, the native inhabitants of large parts of Western Europe in the first millennium B. The Gallic wine culture spread inland after the Roman conquest up the Rhone and Rhine rivers to the rest of Europe where, centuries later, primarily monasteries, such as the Cistercian abbey of Vougeot in Burgundy, refined viniculture to such a degree that it became a model for the rest of the world.
