Scientists Just Traced The Origins Of Modern Wine To 2,000-Year-Old Tuscan Seeds

Two ancient wells, sealed for nearly two millennia beneath a hilltop in Tuscany, held a secret worth waiting for. Inside them, scientists found grape seeds now helping rewrite what we know about the origins of modern wine.

Researchers analyzed waterlogged grape seeds recovered from Cetamura del Chianti, an archaeological site in Italy’s famed Chianti winemaking region, and mapped the most extensive genetic history of ancient grapevines ever recovered from a single site. What they found was not just a record of survival, but evidence that ancient vineyards were part of a highly sophisticated agricultural network that laid the foundation for the wine we drink today.

“It is incredible to think that the wine grapes enjoyed by the ancient Romans are mere steps away from the varieties we pour into our glasses today,” said Dr. Nathan Wales, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. “When you drink wine made from these relic varieties, you are tasting history that is just a stone’s throw from what was served at Roman dinner tables thousands of years ago.”

Ancient Wells in Tuscany Preserved 2,000 Years of Wine History

Cetamura del Chianti sits on a hilltop in Siena province in Tuscany’s Chianti region. Between 300 BCE and 300 CE, local residents dropped grape seeds into deep wells, where oxygen-free mud preserved them for millennia. Excavations uncovered two of those wells packed with seeds, pollen, wood, and animal bones, and from them researchers recovered 310 grape seeds spanning from roughly 300 BCE to approximately 1200 CE.

For this study, researchers focused on 80 of those seeds, extracting ancient DNA and applying shape analysis, light-scanning, and radiocarbon dating to cross-check results. Seeds from deeper layers yielded better DNA than shallower ones, suggesting the mud created a stable environment that slowed genetic degradation over time.

Chianti’s Famous Wine Region Was Once Dominated by White Grapes

When researchers ran the genetic data through a relatedness analysis, asking which seeds were genetically identical to each other, the results upended expectations. Out of 32 seeds with high enough data quality for the test, 27 belonged to a single clonal group, meaning they came from the same grapevine lineage, likely maintained for generations by taking cuttings from valued vines. Copying a grapevine through cuttings produces a plant genetically identical to the original, and it is how farmers have always preserved prized varieties.

Radiocarbon dating confirmed this lineage spanned a minimum of 362 years, from ancient times through the Roman era. But the bigger surprise was what those grapes actually were. Genetic markers indicated the dominant variety most likely produced white grapes, with a 92.2% likelihood based on a model trained on modern varieties.

That finding lands with particular irony given that Chianti is one of the most celebrated red wine regions in the world today. “What a delightful surprise to learn that the world-famous red wine of today was actually preceded by a white vintage that was curated and maintained for centuries,” said Professor Nancy De Grummond of Florida State University. Two other seeds showed signals consistent with dark-berry varieties, suggesting red wine was probably not entirely absent from the site.

Ancient DNA Links Tuscan Vines to France and the World’s Oldest Living Grapevine

Beyond the locally maintained variety, the genetic data told a broader story about how wine spread across the ancient world. The dominant Cetamura clonal group, along with one transitional-period seed, showed close genetic ties to grape seeds from a first-century Roman farm at Mont Ferrier in southern France. Finding genetically related vines in Tuscany and southern France during the same era points to a deliberate, wide-reaching agricultural trading network built by the Romans to standardize wine production across the empire.

One Cetamura seed also belonged to a grape family with a living descendant. Its closest modern relative is a rare Hungarian variety called ‘Baratcsuha szurke,’ which belongs to the same broader clonal family as ‘Žametovka,’ a Slovenian grape whose oldest specimen is officially recognized as the oldest living grapevine in the world, still producing fruit after more than 400 years in the city of Maribor.

During the later period of Roman control, new grape varieties with distinct genetic profiles appeared at the site, including one genetically closer to varieties from the Balkans, suggesting vines being brought in from eastern parts of the expanding empire. At Cetamura del Chianti, the genetic record published in the Journal of Archaeological Science shows something more human than conquest and replacement: a vine worth keeping, passed from hand to hand across centuries of change, and still echoed in the grapes grown across Europe today.

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