Since ancient times, people have been drinking wine. Wine is the fermented juice of fruit, most notably grapes, which have naturally occurring yeast in their skins. After the fruit juice has been squeezed from the fruit, yeast reacts with the natural sugar in the juice and converts it into alcohol through the process of fermentation.

The oldest wine yet discovered was detected in the residue in two clay jars found when archeologists excavated a 7,000-year-old farming village in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq. Although the jars were uncovered in 1968, the residue was not identified until 1996. That's when an archeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the residue and detected tartaric acid, found in large quantities only in grapes, and terebinth tree resin, known as an age-old wine preservative.

Winemaking was originally a practical matter: with little pure water to drink and no refrigeration, the fermented juice...