The study of ancient wine has blossomed as a topic of scholarly inquiry over the past 40 years. Once primarily the purview of scholars of Greek and Roman literature, the field has gained an increasingly scientific focus with the rise of subdisciplines such as archaeobotany (the study of ancient plant remains), palynology (the study of pollen remains in ancient sediments), DNA studies (which permit the tracing of grapevine lineages across time and space) and organic residue analysis (which involves the careful testing of pottery and other material remains for traces of wine). The 1996 volume The Origins and Ancient History of Wine (co-edited by the godfather of ancient wine studies, P. McGovern) represented a groundbreaking collection of articles devoted to disentangling the complex question(s) of where, when and how wine was first born and subsequently spread across the ancient Near East and eastern Mediterranean between the seventh and first millennia bce. More than any other volume in the field, The Origins and Ancient History of Wine pointed the way towards a new era in the history of ancient wine research in which scholars from diverse disciplines listened to each other with an understanding that the results found in one subfield could have dramatic effects on the answers to questions that all scholars involved in the project were seeking.

Due in no small part to the impact of this volume, the next three decades saw a notable rise in both the quantity and quality of research devoted to ancient wine. Existing disciplines found new ways to answer longstanding questions, while new disciplines were founded or reimagined in order to come at the topic from new angles. Eventually, the need arose for further colloquia at which scholars from all of these subfields could come together to discuss their findings and once again orient the field towards the future by consolidating and cross-pollinating recent advances in both data and methodology.

Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology is the result of exactly such a symposium held in 2021. The conference’s keynote speaker was McGovern, whose contribution is set prominently near the beginning of the volume. The topic of the conference (and of its resulting proceedings) was specifically wine during the Roman period (and within the geographical space of the Roman Empire). In this sense the 2021 conference represented something new, a focus on another place and time with great relevance to the development of wine culture in antiquity. At the same time the conference and its resulting volume represent in many ways the spiritual successor to McGovern’s 1996 edited volume.

Following in the footsteps of the earlier book, Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology is structured as a series of reports from a diverse array of scholars devoted to the study of ancient wine. But as interest in the field of ancient wine has grown, so also have the number and complexity of subdisciplines with something to bring to the table multiplied. The contributions are designed not just to describe results to fellow experts but to explain beforehand the methodologies involved in collecting and analysing data that led to the results being presented. As such, the volume has both didactic and scholarly value: readers can expect both to learn about the various disciplines relevant to the study of ancient wine and to gain insight into what those disciplines can contribute to the larger question. The book is likewise visually attractive, with colour pictures and images along with a plethora of charts and graphs displaying crucial information in a way accessible to non-specialists.

The volume is divided into five main parts, each containing three or four chapters. The first section serves as an introduction, with contributions by the volume’s editors Dodd and Van Limbergen as well as the contribution from McGovern. Those unfamiliar with the study of ancient wine will benefit particularly from reading these three chapters, as they serve as a useful synthesis of the state of the field. The next section focuses on the usefulness of DNA studies as well as organic residue analysis to discern the movement of different subspecies of grapevine across the Mediterranean in antiquity as well as to confirm the presence of wine (and often of particular varieties of wine) in pottery connected to specific times and places from the Roman world. The third section discusses the contributions of archaeobotany and palynology to analyse plant and pollen remains from the ancient world in order to gauge what kind of grapevines were being grown (or, in some cases, were growing wild) at what times and in what parts of the ancient Roman world. The last two sections introduce readers to newer techniques that show promise for the study of ancient wine and vine-growing: the use of GIS (Geographic Information System) software to identify specific plots of land for further study due to their likely suitability for grapevines in antiquity, and the use of experimental archaeology to gain greater insight into the process of Roman wine production.

While each of the chapters in the volume is useful in its own right, a couple stand out as making particularly notable contributions. A. Zifferero’s chapter ‘Archaeology and Grape DNA’ discusses the use of DNA studies to trace the spread of the grapevine across the Mediterranean as a prelude to a discussion of the vines found in the Albegna Valley of southern Tuscany. By studying the DNA of these grapevines, Zifferero’s team has ascertained that the autochthonous wild grapevines in the immediate region were genetically impacted by the introduction of vines from Magna Graecia probably in the seventh century bce (based on archaeological evidence in the region). One of the major debates in the field during the last two decades has been the question to what degree each wine-producing region of the Mediterranean domesticated its own grapevine rather than importing the vine that was domesticated in the Near East sometime in the Neolithic; by providing evidence that grapevines grown in Tuscany were in part derived from Magna Graecia, this article weighs in on the side of an ultimate connection to the aboriginal Near Eastern domestication(s). Likewise, the chapter by A.G. Brown, I. Meadows and S.D. Turner entitled ‘Roman Viticulture from Palynology: A Review and New Data from the British Isles’ provides significant evidence via grapevine pollen recovered from securely dated strata in various locations across modern-day England that the grapevine was indeed being grown at the far northern edge of the Roman Empire, a claim heavily contested and even denied in much of the literature previously. These chapters and the conclusions they reach on hotly argued topics exemplify the power that these innovative approaches to the data hold potentially to settle long-standing debates while opening the door to further advances whose impact we can only imagine.

The greatest limitation of the volume might seem to be that it focuses only on wine production during the Roman period, but the shape of the conference and the subsequent volume shows that the topic is of appropriate size and scope for the purpose. A larger focus would have risked giving short shrift to the evidence for the Roman era. Perhaps what the book has done is to create a template for future conferences and edited volumes to be devoted to bringing the significant resources of the scholarly community to bear on individual regions and time periods.

Arguably the greatest achievement of the volume is to bring together all the relevant scientific subdisciplines into one place in order to give readers an easily accessible but highly informative brief on the extraordinary diversity of approaches being used today to study questions surrounding ancient wine. Those reading through the volume’s seventeen chapters will be struck by the sheer potential of the field to branch out into unexpected directions and make perhaps unexpected discoveries in the years to come. Indeed, it is the interdisciplinarity of the volume that is its greatest asset. While all of its conclusions will and must be tested and sometimes modified or discarded as new evidence comes forward, it is the methodologies under discussion that will prove to be the most relevant for decades to come. This is true not only of the methodologies pertinent to the individual subfields represented within the volume, but also the meta-methodology that the book represents, namely the awareness of the need to break down walls and to build working relationships across scholarly boundaries.

As a Classicist trained primarily in the languages and literatures of the ancient Mediterranean world who happens to have written his Ph.D. dissertation (and a subsequent book) on ancient wine and thus become quite familiar with the relevant scientific disciplines, I also appreciated (as will other Classicists) the ample space given in the volume to the ancient literary testimony surrounding wine and the grapevine. While no one chapter is devoted to this topic, the authors of many individual contributions show significant awareness of what the ancient Romans had to say about wine and even in many cases allow their work to be guided by the ancient testimony. This ease of interdisciplinarity between fields often considered quite disparate from each other within the academic matrix again demonstrates a fundamental commitment to scholarly advancement. The only field with something to add to the discussion that lacked any mention within this volume was linguistics, and it was precisely on the question of what that field can contribute to the conversation surrounding ancient wine that McGovern and I had a fruitful correspondence that began in 2017 and lasted until he sadly passed away in 2025. The genuine interest Pat showed was a heartening display of the deep commitment that he and the other researchers featured in Methods in Ancient Wine Archaeology possess to disentangling the complex story of ancient wine with the help of all available tools.