From Vine to Vinegar

c. 20,000 BCE

Eurasia · the end of the last ice age

Wild grapes and the retreating ice

As the ice sheets of the last ice age pulled back, wild grapevines spread through the river forests of Eurasia, climbing into the trees. Genetic studies of grapevines by researchers at UC Irvine and UC Davis suggest people were already gathering and eating wild grapes around this time, thousands of years before anyone planted a vineyard.

Here is where we speculate. People who came back to the same vines season after season likely learned to tend them: clearing the growth around them and thinning the fruit, the way growers still drop early bunches today. And crushed grapes left in a skin bag or a hollow log would have fermented, then soured. Nobody invented the first vinegar. It happened on its own, and someone decided it tasted good.

Documented, with speculation

c. 9000 BCE

The Caucasus and Western Asia

The vine is domesticated

A large 2023 genetic study found that grapevines were domesticated about 11,000 years ago, in two places at once: the Caucasus and Western Asia. Domesticated vines bore bigger, sweeter fruit and more reliable crops than their wild ancestors.

This was the same era in which people settled into the first farming villages, planting grain and herding animals. Honey was already ancient by then. People have raided wild hives for as long as there have been people, and rock paintings in Spain show honey gatherers at work thousands of years ago. The two halves of sweet and sour, honey and soured grape juice, were within reach of the same cooks long before anyone wrote down a recipe.

Documented

c. 6000 BCE

Georgia · south of Tbilisi

The first known wine

Residue in clay jars from Neolithic villages south of Tbilisi is the oldest chemical evidence of winemaking anywhere. The jars were decorated with grape clusters, a sign of how much the vine already mattered.

Georgians still ferment and age wine in clay vessels called qvevri, buried up to their necks in the earth, where the temperature barely changes, and traditionally lined with beeswax. UNESCO lists the method as cultural heritage. The country is home to hundreds of native grapes, such as Saperavi and Rkatsiteli, unlike anything most Western drinkers know, and many of our wine grapes likely trace their family tree back to this corner of the world.

Documented

c. 4100 BCE

Areni-1 cave · Armenia

The first known winery

In a cave in the shadow of Mt. Ararat, archaeologists found a complete small winery: a clay platform for treading grapes, a vat to catch the juice, storage jars, a drinking cup and grape seeds and skins. The same cave held the oldest leather shoe ever found.

Our speculation: an operation this organized would have had batches that turned. Some were surely thrown out. Others, we suspect, were kept, used to sharpen food and preserve it through the winter. Wherever there was a winery, there was almost certainly vinegar.

Documented, with speculation

Bronze Age

Mesopotamia and Egypt

Vinegar as an ingredient

Cuneiform records from Mesopotamia list vinegar made from date and grape wines, used as a seasoning, a preservative and a medicine. In Egypt, tomb paintings show grape harvests, treading and pressing in careful detail, and jars were labeled with the vintage, the vineyard and the winemaker.

Vinegar was one of the first ways people kept food through the lean months: pickled vegetables, preserved fish, sauces that kept. In a real sense, this is where condiments begin.

Documented

c. 800 – 100 BCE

Etruria · central Italy

The Etruscans

Before Rome, central Italy belonged to the Etruscans, a sophisticated, literate culture in what is now Tuscany, Umbria and northern Lazio. They grew vines, made wine and shipped it in amphorae across the western Mediterranean. At Lattara, near Montpellier, archaeologists found a stone pressing platform from around 425 BCE, the earliest known evidence of winemaking in France, likely learned from Etruscan traders.

The Romans absorbed a great deal from the Etruscans, from engineering and religion to banqueting, and we suspect much of their wine culture too, then made it their own. Tuscany’s long wine tradition starts here.

Documented, with speculation

c. 400 BCE

Ancient Greece

Oxymel

Hippocrates prescribed oxymel, “sharp honey,” a mixture of vinegar and honey, for everything from coughs to digestion. The name was new; the combination was not. Honey and soured wine had shared kitchens for thousands of years. Oxymel is the namesake of our sweetest reduction.

Vinegar was everyday table fare in Greece. A small dish for dipping bread in vinegar, the oxybaphon, gave its name to a unit of measure. Greeks also mixed wine with honey, spices and water, and argued about how best to drink it.

Documented

Roman era

Rome and its provinces

Posca, defrutum and the dolium

Soldiers drank posca, vinegar cut with water. Cooks boiled grape must down into defrutum and sapa, sweet syrups used the way we use our Mosti, and the recipes collected under the name Apicius are full of sauces balanced with vinegar and honey.

Wine moved through the empire in amphorae by the millions and was stored in huge clay dolia, often sunk partly into the ground. Farm writers such as Columella gave instructions for making vinegar, proof that it was already a product worth making on purpose.

Documented

Middle Ages

Italy and France

Agresto and verjuice

Growers thinned the vines early in the season, and those green grapes were pressed into agresto, or verjuice, a tart juice that gives our most acidic reduction its name. Growers still drop early fruit today, so the remaining grapes ripen with more flavor.

Medieval cooking across Europe ran on sour: verjuice, vinegar and sweet-and-sour sauces sharpened with fruit and spice. In Sicily, Arab cooks left behind agrodolce. Sour was not a garnish. It was the backbone of the kitchen.

Documented

1394 – 1700s

Orléans and Paris

Vinegar becomes a business

Orléans sat on the Loire, where wine was shipped toward Paris. As the story goes, wine that soured on the journey stayed behind and was turned into vinegar. In 1394 the city’s vinegar makers were granted their own guild, with strict rules on how vinegar was made. Their slow method, aging wine in partly filled oak barrels with a living mother culture, is still the benchmark for quality.

By the 1700s vinegar was a proper trade. Maille opened in Paris in 1747 selling vinegars and mustards, and Martin-Pouret, founded in Orléans in 1797, still makes vinegar the Orléans way. In Modena, families kept a batteria of balsamic casks for generations, and by tradition gave them as dowries.

Documented

1823 – 1950s

Germany and France

Science speeds things up

In 1823 the Schützenbach “quick process” trickled wine through tall vats packed with wood shavings, turning months of work into days. In the 1860s, Louis Pasteur, consulting for the vinegar makers of Orléans, showed that living bacteria do the work.

In the 1950s the submerged acetator made vinegar faster still. The 20th century made vinegar cheap and everywhere, and mostly forgettable. The craft revival of the last few decades has been about winning back what speed left behind.

Documented

Through the centuries

The wine regions of Europe

Wood, clay and concrete

Every wine region found its own way to age wine, and most have a vinegar tradition to match. White oak became the standard: the 225-liter Bordeaux barrique, or fût de chêne; Italy’s large botte and the small caratello used for Vin Santo; Germany’s Stückfass on the Rhine and Fuder on the Mosel; the Portuguese pipa, or port pipe, and the Spanish pipón.

In Jerez, sherry and sherry vinegar age in a solera: stacked rows of barrels where younger wine from the upper criaderas refreshes the older wine below. Spain calls the craft of aging crianza. In Modena, traditional balsamic moves through a batteria of ever-smaller casks made of different woods.

Clay never went away. Portugal’s talhas and Spain’s tinajas are still in use, and terracotta amphorae are back in modern cellars, like the ones in the photo at the top of this page. In the 20th century, concrete vats became standard across southern France: thermally stable, neutral and built to last. Today, concrete eggs bring that idea back at a small scale.

Documented

1500s – today

Six continents

The vine travels

Spanish missionaries carried vines to Mexico, Peru, Chile and Argentina in the 1500s, and Franciscan friars planted the Mission grape in California in the late 1700s. Dutch settlers made the first Cape wine in South Africa in 1659, and vines reached Australia with the First Fleet in 1788 and New Zealand by 1819.

Today wine is made on every continent but Antarctica. Italy, France and Spain still lead, followed by the United States, Australia, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Germany and Portugal. Newer and revived regions keep adding to the map: Tannat in Uruguay, Koshu in Japan, icewine in Canada, sparkling wine in southern England, Cabernet in China’s Ningxia, and the ancient grapes of Georgia and Armenia finding new audiences. Every one of these places can, and often does, make vinegar from its wine.

Documented

Today

San Francisco

Atomiq

We make vinegar from single-varietal California wines, vintage-dated like the wines they come from, and we look for heirloom and little-known varieties wherever we can find them. Every vinegar spends at least six months in white oak.

Behind that is a small laboratory: modern fermentation, our own take on the generators of the 1800s, and tools borrowed from science that let us capture the intense flavor of fruit at its peak without cooking it away. All year we follow the harvest, from wine grapes in the fall to winter citrus, making seasonal condiments the way people have seasoned their food through twenty thousand years of seasons. Old traditions, new tools, and the balance of sour and sweet.

Our part