(DiscoverMagazine) - In vino veritas, as the popular Latin saying goes. And we’ve got 20 truths of our own about that liquid grape goodness.

1. You may associate ancient wine with the toga-wearing set, but by the time Romans were quaffing it, the beverage was itself ancient: 7,000-year-old pottery from sites in Iran’s Zagros Mountains tested positive for residues specific to grapes.

2. A couple of hundred miles north, archaeologists have found numerous artifacts near the Armenian village of Areni that point to organized wine production as early as 4000 B.C.

3. Winemaking may go back so far because it’s so easy: Smash some grapes and let the juice mix with yeasts naturally present on the skins for a few days. Voila! Paleowine.

4. A big difference between domesticated wine grapes and their wild ancestors is pollination. Wild grapes are dioecious; plants are male or female. Domesticated grapes are usually self-pollinating hermaphrodites, which improves trait consistency.

5. Lovers of today’s oaky chardonnays and bold cabernets would be surprised if they sipped a vintage 5000 B.C. A paper from 2008 suggests the earliest wines were prized for their sweetness.

6. Sweet or dry, while most dictionaries define wine as fermented fruit juice, others, as well as the European Union, limit the term to products derived only from grapes.

7. And the EU has some clout in the wine world: In 2015, more than 60 percent of wine produced globally was made in an EU-member state.

8. Grapes are the go-to wine fruit because they contain the right proportions of water, tannins, sugar and acids for yeast to multiply and for sugar to break down into alcohol and carbon dioxide.

9. Wines made from other fruits typically contain added sugar and other ingredients for flavor and to balance out the fermentation process.

10. The Vikings once called North America “Vinland” for the bounty of wild grapes they spotted, but varieties native to our shores aren’t the best for making wine due to a “foxy,” or earthy, taste.

11. Even Thomas Jefferson, a viticulture enthusiast, couldn’t bottle an American vintage from his vineyards. He didn’t fare much better at cultivating European grapes there either, given their susceptibility to black rot and the insect phylloxera, a relative of the aphid.