Most ampelographers, archaeologists, botanists, and vine geneticists agree that the origins of viticulture (i.e., viticulture and winemaking) lie in what might be called "The Fertile Triangle" of the vine, a vast highland region between the Taurus Mountains (eastern Turkey), the Zagros Mountains (western Iran), and the Caucasus Mountains (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan).
The prominent Russian botanist and geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1926) suggested that the area of greatest morphological diversity usually corresponds to the center of origin of a cultivar, which led his disciple Aleksandr Mikhailovich Negrul (1938; 1968) to the conclusion that Transcaucasia (the area between the Black and Caspian Seas extending from the Greater Caucasus to the Turkish and Iranian borders, and comprising Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) or southern Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) can be considered the cradle of the cultivated vine since these are the areas with the greatest diversity of Vitis vinifera.
When was the first grapevine domesticated? We will probably never know but analysis of archaeological remains of grapes and vessels may provide some clues. However, the remains found in archaeological excavations usually consist of charred seeds and charred wood, and the charring process together with the enormous variability between wild (silvestris) and cultivated (vinifera) vines, makes it difficult to identify them as one or the other. Charred pips have been found in numerous prehistoric excavations in Europe (Greece, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Spain; Rivera Núñez and Walker 1989) and in southwest Asia (Zohary and Hopf 2000), but these ancient remains of wild grape berries were collected long before domestication. According to Georgian ampelographer Revaz Ramishvili, six 8,000-year-old pips found at the Neolithic site of Shulaveris Gora in the hills south of Tbilisi, one of the earliest known permanent settlements in Georgia, are pear-shaped like those most typical of the vinifera and presumably from seeds of the first domesticated vine (McGovern 2003), but their identification remains doubtful.