Did wine and/or beer originate from a single source (country, region, culture, etc) and then spread throughout the world, or did wine and/or beer develop independently in multiple unconnected cultures across the globe?

by MizterF

I have always been curious if the history of wine or beer can be traced to a single source or if they are an example of multiple discovery/simultaneous invention.

Daztur

There are a few different ways of making alcohol.

  1. Having carbohydrates that yeast can eat as-is. For example, fruit juice or table sugar can metabolized by yeast and turned into wine without humans doing anything. Yeast is present on the skins and flowers of many fruits (Vadkertiová, Renáta & Molnárová, Jana & Vránová, Dana & Sláviková, Elena. (2012). Yeasts and yeast-like organisms associated with fruits and blossoms of different fruit trees. Canadian journal of microbiology) so alcohol can form spontaneously on over-ripe fruit. So if you count eating overripe fruit that contains alcohol as "wine" then wine wasn't invented by humans at all and plenty of animals get drunk by eating overripe fruit. Plenty of humans did this all over the world. If you just leave out some fruit juice on the table in an open container for a while it'll turn into wine as long as it doesn't have preservatives in it. It probably won't be very good wine and it might also get some mold or bacteria growing in it but it will have alcohol in it.
  2. But yeast CAN'T eat grain, the carbohydrates are too complex. So you have to break them down if you want to make any kind of alcohol with great. This can be done in several ways. One way is to break down the carbohydrates in grain by chewing so that the enzymes in human saliva can turn the carbohyrates into something that yeast can eat and turn into alcohol. This is done with South American chicha for example. It's hard to nail down when and where this was invented due to paucity of evidence.
  3. Have aspergillus mold break down the carbohydrates into something that yeast can eat. This is done with modern sake and Korean makgeolli and there is archeological evidence in the form of residue on ceramics that it was done in pre-historic China
  4. Malting. This is the normal way of making beer and similar drinks. What is done is that you allow the grain to germinate (sprout just a little) then you roast it slightly (but this roasting isn't strictly necessary, just almost always done or the grain will rot) and cook in water at a very specific temperature range that varies slightly according to what grain you're using. This sauces enzymes in the grain to break down the carbohydrates present in the grain into maltose that yeast can eat. Then you add yeast and get beer. This was done in ancient pre-history in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China and seems to have spread from there but it was invented so incredibly early on that it's hard to see who invented it first and whether those inventions were independent. Doing this by accident while trying to make porridge doesn't seem very difficult but it is a more involved process than the other methods.

So since there are a whole slew of different ways to make alcohol and some can be as simple as "leave some fruit on the ground and don't do anything" it was certainly developed independently all over the place. Yeast naturally produce alcohol without humans doing anything, all humans need to do is make things a little bit easier.

Professor Li Liu has done some excellent work on very early alcohol production. For example you can see the following sources:
https://is.muni.cz/el/phil/jaro2019/PAPVA_02/um/Liu_et_al_2018_Fermented_beverage_and_food_storage_in_13_000_y.pdf
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X19305486

The "qu starter" referenced in the second article appears to be very similar to modern Korean "nuruk" which is bunch of grain that contains mold, bacteria, and yeast that is added to cooked rice and water to produce makgeolli.