Some readers, assuming that grapes were unknown in pre-Columbian America, have wondered why the Book of Mormon mentions “wine” (Mosiah 11:15; 22:10; Alma 55:9; 3 Nephi 18:1; Moroni 6:6) and “liquors” (Alma 55:32).1 However, “there is ample evidence of the wide distribution both in North and South America of native undistilled alcoholic liquors, or beers and wines.”2 American species of grapes were grown in various regions of the Americas, including New Mexico, the West Indies, the Atlantic Gulf Coast, and the Yucatan. The Opata of northern Mexico, for example, reportedly made red wine from local grapes. Archaeologists have also identified seeds of grapes (vitis vinifera) in Chiapas, Mexico, dating to the Late Pre-Classic Period and these may have been used to make wine. 

The term wine, however, need not refer specifically to beverages of grapes. “There is no reason why the term `wine’ should not be retained to include the many varieties of liquor made by savage and semi-civilized races from the sap of trees. The latex of vegetable stems is sufficiently homologous with the juice of fruits, as that of the grape, to be classified with it in a genus [of beverages] distinct from fermented grains.”3 In addition to using grapes, Mesoamericans made a variety of fermented beverages from other fruits and plants, including, bananas, pineapple, agave, cactus fruit, palm sap, and tree bark with honey. The Spanish referred to the beverages made from these fruits as “wine” when they arrived in the New World.

• 1. John A. Price, “The Book of Mormon vs Anthropological Prehistory,” The Indian Historian 7 (Summer, 1974): 35–40.
• 2. Weston La Barre, “Native American Beers,” American Anthropologist 40, no. 2 (1938): 224.
• 3. A. E. Crawley, “Drinks, drinking,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 73.