The history of the wine press and of pressing is nearly as old as the history of wine itself with the remains of wine presses providing some of the longest-serving evidence of organised viticulture and winemaking in the ancient world. The earliest wine press was probably the human foot or hand, crushing and squeezing grapes into a bag or container where the contents would ferment. The pressure applied by these manual means was limited and these early wines were probably pale in colour and body, and eventually ancient winemakers sought out alternative means of pressing their wine. By at least the 18th dynasty, the ancient Egyptians were employing a "sack press" made of cloth that was squeezed with the aid of a giant tourniquet. The use of a wine press in winemaking is mentioned frequently in the Bible but these presses were more elaboration of treading lagars where grapes that were tread by feet with the juice running off into special basins. The more modern idea of a piece of a winemaking equipment used to extract the juice from the skins probably emerged during the Greco-Roman periods from which written accounts by Cato the Elder, Marcus Terentius Varro, Pliny the Elder and others described wooden wine presses that utilized large beams, capstans and windlasses to exert pressure on the pomace. The wines produced by these presses were usually darker, with more color extracted from the skins but could also be more harsh with bitter tannins also extracted. That style of wine press would eventually evolve into the basket press used in the Middle Ages by wine estates of the nobility and Catholic Church leading to the modern tank batch and continuous presses used in wineries today.
Early history
The exact origins of winemaking (and, thus, of pressing grapes) are not known, but most archaeologists believe that it originated somewhere in the Transcaucasia between the Black and Caspian Seas in the land that now includes the modern countries of Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran. There are stories in the Imeretin Valley (in what is now Krasnodar Krai, Russia) dating to between 7000 and 5000 BC of early winemaking using hollowed-out logs that they would fill with grapes, tread with their feet and then scoop the juice and crushed grape remains into jars to ferment. In the 17th century, French traveller Sir Jean Chardin described a similar practice still in use thousands of years later in Georgia. The earliest evidence of deliberate winemaking is from excavation at sites like Areni-1 winery in what is now the Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia. This site, dating back to around 4000 BC included a trough that measured about 3 by 3 1/2 feet and included a drain that went into a 2-foot-long vat that could contain about 14–15 gallons (52–57 liters) of wine. The carbon dating of these sites (and earlier sites at Çatalhöyük and Neolithic B sites in Jordan) are based on left over grape pips (seeds) and while they provide solid evidence of wine making, they do not necessarily provide evidence of how the wine was made and if the modern concept of pressing (i.e. extracting juice from the skins and separating it from the skins and seeds) was used.
Winemaking in ancient Egypt probably used people's feet for crushing and pressing the grapes, but tomb paintings excavated at Thebes showed that the ancient Egyptians developed some innovations to their wine presses-such as the use of long bars hanging over the treading basins and straps that the workers could hold onto while treading. Hieroglyph and paintings also showed the Egyptians by at least by the 18th Dynasty (c. 1550 – c. 1292 BC) were also using a type of cloth "sack press" in which grapes or skins left over from treading would be twisted and squeezed by a tourniquet to release the juice. A modified version of this sack press had the sack hung between two large poles with workers holding each pole. After the grapes were loaded into the sack, the workers would walk in opposite directions, squeezing the grapes in the bag and capturing the juice in a vat underneath the bag. This early wine press not only had the benefit of exerting more pressure on the skins and extracting more juice than treading but the cloth also acted an early form of filtering the wine.
Ancient Greece and Rome
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
