Patrick McGovern, alcohol archaeologist known as ‘the Indiana Jones’ of ancient wine
Dr Patrick McGovern: inside a 700BC Turkish tomb thought to belong to King Midas, he detected a sort of wine-beer cocktail made using honey, barley malt, white muscat grapes and saffron
Patrick McGovern, who has died aged 80, was an “alcohol archaeologist” who created authentic ales and wines using residues from ancient pots and showed, in effect, that the progress of civilisation was lubricated – and probably driven – by alcohol.
Known as the “Indiana Jones” of ancient wines, McGovern, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (the “Penn Museum”), maintained that alcohol was so vital to ancient peoples that he called our species Homo imbibens.
By analysing the residues found on fragments of pottery using techniques such as chromatography and mass spectrometry, and studying references in ancient texts (he could decipher Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Hebrew and Arabic as well as reading Latin and Greek), McGovern worked with Dogfish Head, a craft brewery in Delaware, to recreate ancient beverages that seemed lost to history.
It is impossible for archaeologists to recover alcohol itself as it evaporates, but McGovern developed a series of tests for traces of substances indicating alcohol was once present – such as tartaric acid, the chemical fingerprint of grapes. He also detected traces of flavouring ingredients such as honey, herbs and spices – even, in the case of one ancient Egyptian tomb, the laxative senna.
The first drink that he recreated, based on molecular evidence from residues found inside a 700BC Turkish tomb, was a sort of wine-beer cocktail made using honey, barley malt, white muscat grapes and saffron. As the tomb was believed to have been that of King Midas, it was named “Midas Touch”. In 2000 a gala recreation of Midas’s funerary feast was held at the Penn Museum and paired Midas Touch with a spicy barbecued lamb and lentil stew.
The oldest beer McGovern recreated he called Chateau Jiahu, the ingredients for which – hawthorn fruit, Chinese wild grapes, rice, honey and corn (milled and moistened in the maker’s mouth to convert into fermentable sugars) – were discovered inside a 9,000-year-old tomb in China. “It goes well with Asian food; it has a sweet and sour profile,” McGovern claimed.
As residues of alcoholic drinks have been found in tombs around the world, McGovern believed they were probably used during funerary celebrations or rituals and perhaps to wish good luck to important people in the afterlife.
Although such beverages were mainly “high status” drinks (wine, in particular, was an expensive commodity, especially in northern Europe where it had to be imported), in some places and periods ordinary people seem to have enjoyed alcohol too.
While excavating a humble kitchen in a Neolithic village at Hajji Firuz in north-western Iran, McGovern and colleagues found six nine-litre jars set into the clay floor. Analysis revealed that they contained wine flavoured with a tree resin. “If the six jars in the kitchen of one ordinary house are any measure, drinking in the village was not a privilege of only the rich and famous,” he concluded.
Traces of wine from the site, dating back to 5400BC, were thought to be the earliest conclusive evidence of wine production when they were analysed in 1994. But in 2017 McGovern led an international team which found evidence of wine production in two much earlier sites in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia – dating back to 6000-5800 BC.
Yet McGovern believed that it is likely that humans have been making alcoholic drinks for much longer than that. Alcohol, after all, is a naturally occurring substance; fruits naturally ferment, producing “wild” alcohol, and humans have been equipped with the genetic means to deal effectively with the toxic by-products of ethanol digestion for the last 10 million years.
McGovern believed that key leaps, such as the development of farming, could be linked to alcohol. “Which came first, bread or beer?” he asked. “You need food to exist. But if you want to have a good time, if you want to have something safer than water to drink, if you want to have something safe to take medicine in and so live longer, if you want social lubrication, if you want to up your sexual relations and so produce more children, then alcoholic beverages help.”
Alcohol, he believed, was also probably crucial in developing language, music and the arts – even religion: “You get into the mind-altering effect… You can relate that to some meaning in the universe, and that’s why alcoholic beverages are usually incorporated right at the centre of all religions.”
He regarded efforts to encourage or enforce abstention to be futile. “Ten percent of the enzymes in the human liver are devoted to processing alcohol,” he pointed out. “We have enzymes in our mouths to convert starch to sugar… we are set up to consume an alcoholic beverage.”
However, he emphasised that humans are only adapted to consumption in moderation: “Alcohol is so readily available now that people overdo it. But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore its positive effects. Before you had synthetic medicine, [alcohol] would have been the original universal medicine. That’s the way I see it.”
The oldest of three boys, Patrick Edward McGovern was born in Texas on December 9 1944 and brought up in New York. A talented pianist, he once considered a career in music, but instead studied chemistry at Cornell University, took a PhD in neurochemistry at the University of Rochester, then after becoming fascinated by ancient history, took another PhD in Near Eastern archaeology and literature from the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
He remained in Philadelphia, becoming scientific director of tje Biomolecular Archaeology Laboratory at the Penn Museum where he was also Adjunct Professor of Anthropology.
His early work involved studying pottery and glass fragments before he focused on the study of residues from ancient jars. In early research he studied jars containing “royal purple”, a high-status dye extracted from sea-snail glands and used by the Phoenicians of the ancient Near East.
This led him to specialise in ancient organic materials more generally, including the residues of ancient wines and beers found on pottery fragments.
Recreating the drinks of the past was a somewhat hit-and-miss affair, he admitted: “The results can be horrible. But once you’ve created something that’s tasty and delicious, it’s like you’ve brought the past back to life.”
McGovern published numerous scientific papers and wrote or co-wrote several books including Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (2003), Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages (2009) and Ancient Brews Rediscovered and Recreated (2017).
His first involvement with wine, however, occurred when he and his then girlfriend Doris Nordmeier helped with the 1971 harvest in the Mosel Valley in Germany. They married the following year.
In a 2011 interview with the Smithsonian Magazine McGovern was asked what drink he would like to be included in his own tomb and he picked a 1971 Mosel Riesling: “It was an elixir, something out of this world” he recalled. “‘If you were going to drink something for eternity, you might drink that.”
His wife survives him.
Patrick McGovern, born December 9 1944, died August 24 2025
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