Grapes: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. The Wild Vine and Its Awkward Problem
2. Two Domestications, Eleven Thousand Years Ago
3. The Oldest Wine: Georgia, About 6000 BCE
4. Areni-1, Hajji Firuz and the Wider Near East
5. Mesopotamia and Egypt
6. Greece and Rome
7. Monasteries and the Medieval Vineyard
8. Across the Atlantic
9. The Phylloxera Catastrophe
10. The Great Grafting, and What Survived Ungrafted
11. Table, Wine and Raisin Grapes Part Company
12. Thompson Seedless
13. The Modern Industry and an Old Vulnerability
14. Research Papers and References
15. Connections
16. Featured Videos

The Wild Vine and Its Awkward Problem

Every wine grape and almost every table grape on earth belongs to a single species, Vitis vinifera. Its wild ancestor is Vitis vinifera subspecies sylvestris, a woody climbing liana that still grows in riverside forests from Portugal to Turkmenistan, hauling itself up trees to reach the light and dropping small, dark, sharply acidic berries.

The wild vine has a feature that made it difficult to farm and whose solution is one of the clearest signatures of domestication. Wild grapevines are dioecious: an individual plant is either male or female, and only the female bears fruit. A wild stand is therefore roughly half unproductive, and a farmer who plants cuttings at random gets a vineyard that may bear almost nothing. Cultivated grapevines are hermaphroditic — every flower carries both stamens and ovary, so every vine sets fruit and can pollinate itself. That change from separate sexes to self-fertile flowers is one of the domestication traits the 2023 Science study traced genetically, alongside selection for berry palatability, muscat flavour and berry skin colour.

Two other differences separate a wild grape from a cultivated one, and both are visible in the archaeological record. Cultivated berries are larger and sweeter, and their pips are longer and narrower with a distinct stalk. Archaeobotanists use pip shape to argue about whether charred grape seeds from a given site came from gathered wild fruit or a planted vineyard — a method with real limits, since pip shape varies with growing conditions as well as ancestry, which is why the chemical and genetic evidence discussed below has been so valuable.

The wild vine also gave humans something else: it is one of the few fruits that ferments essentially by itself. Ripe grape skins carry wild yeasts, and grape juice is sugary enough that crushed fruit left in a container will begin to ferment without help. Nobody had to invent wine. Somebody had to notice it, and then work out how to make it happen on purpose.

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Two Domestications, Eleven Thousand Years Ago

For most of the twentieth century the standard account was a single domestication somewhere in the Near East, with everything else derived from it. That account has been progressively refined and then substantially revised, and it is worth following how, because it shows how much a question like this depends on the tools available.

Arroyo-García and colleagues, working with chloroplast DNA in Molecular Ecology in 2006, found evidence of multiple origins for cultivated grapevine, with signals suggesting that Western Mediterranean growers had domesticated or at least crossed with their own local wild populations rather than simply importing eastern vines. This, Lacombe and Thomas reviewed the whole question of historical origins and genetic diversity in Trends in Genetics the same year.

Myles and colleagues, in PNAS in 2011, brought genome-wide markers to bear on the USDA's grape germplasm collection. They found support for a Near East origin of vinifera together with clear introgression from local sylvestris as the grape moved into Europe — that is, migrating cultivated vines interbred with the wild vines they met along the way. They also found high genetic diversity and rapid decay of linkage disequilibrium, consistent with only a weak domestication bottleneck followed by thousands of years of vegetative propagation. We return to what that implies below, because it is the key to understanding why the modern vineyard is fragile.

Then, in March 2023, Dong and colleagues published in Science the largest analysis yet attempted: 3,525 cultivated and wild accessions gathered by an international consortium spanning Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Israel, Turkey, Ukraine, Croatia, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Germany and China. Their reconstruction runs as follows. During the Pleistocene, harsh climate fragmented the habitat of the wild grape and split it into separate ecotypes. Then, about 11,000 years ago, domestication happened concurrently in two places: in Western Asia, producing table grapevines, and in the Caucasus, producing wine grapevines. The Western Asian domesticates travelled into Europe with early farmers, interbred with ancient wild western vines along the way, and diversified along human migration routes into the muscat family and the distinctive western wine-grape lineages by the late Neolithic.

Two things are worth pausing on. First, 11,000 years ago places grape domestication alongside the founding crops of Neolithic agriculture — wheat, barley, peas, lentils — not centuries later as a luxury afterthought. Second, the split between table and wine grapes is not a later refinement but is present from the beginning, which explains a great deal about why the two behave so differently today.

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The Oldest Wine: Georgia, About 6000 BCE

Genetics reconstructs lineages. To date an actual jar of wine you need chemistry, and the chemistry points to Georgia.

Patrick McGovern and an international team published their analysis in PNAS in November 2017. They examined organic residues absorbed into the fabric of pottery from two early Neolithic village sites in the Republic of Georgia, about fifty kilometres south of Tbilisi: Gadachrili Gora and its neighbour Shulaveris Gora. The pottery dates to roughly 6000–5000 BCE, and the residue evidence for grape wine centres on about 6000–5800 BCE.

The key chemical marker is tartaric acid, which in this part of the world is found in quantity in essentially nothing but the grape, together with associated grape acids. Crucially, the chemical finding did not stand alone. It was corroborated by climatic and environmental reconstruction showing the region was suitable for the wild vine, and by direct archaeobotanical evidence — grape pollen, grape starch and grape epidermal remains recovered in association with the jars. When four independent lines of evidence converge, the conclusion is about as secure as Neolithic archaeology gets. The paper describes this as the earliest biomolecular archaeological evidence for grape wine and viniculture in the Near East.

What makes the Georgian case more than an entry in a record book is that the tradition never stopped. Georgian winemaking in qvevri — large egg-shaped clay vessels buried to the neck in the ground, in which grapes ferment on their skins and stems for months — has been practised continuously in the same region ever since, and was inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. The vessels excavated at Gadachrili Gora are recognisably ancestors of the qvevri still in use. Georgia also retains an extraordinary number of indigenous grape varieties, several hundred of them, a reservoir of diversity that exists nowhere else.

One older textual tradition is worth noting for where it points. The Book of Genesis describes Noah, after the flood, planting a vineyard — the first agricultural act recorded in that text after the waters recede, and set in the mountains of Ararat, which is to say in exactly this region. That is scripture and not evidence, and it postdates the archaeology by thousands of years. But it is a striking piece of cultural memory to find attached to the right place.

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Areni-1, Hajji Firuz and the Wider Near East

Georgia holds the earliest date, but it is one point in a broader Neolithic and Chalcolithic wine landscape across the South Caucasus and the Zagros.

Hajji Firuz Tepe, a Neolithic village in the northern Zagros mountains of Iran, produced a jar whose residue McGovern and colleagues reported in Nature in 1996 under the title "Neolithic resinated wine". The residue contained both tartaric acid and terebinth tree resin — the resin added, almost certainly, as a preservative and antimicrobial, the same practice that survives today in Greek retsina. That jar dates to the sixth millennium BCE and was for two decades the oldest chemically identified wine in the world, until the Georgian material pushed the date back.

Areni-1, a cave complex in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia, produced something different and equally important: not a jar of wine but a winery. Barnard and colleagues published the chemical evidence in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2011, dating wine production at the site to around 4000 BCE. The cave preserved a shallow clay basin for treading grapes, draining into a large vat, together with grape pips, desiccated vine remains and pressed skins. It is the oldest known wine-production facility — the point at which winemaking becomes visibly an installation and a process rather than an accident in a pot. The same cave, remarkably, also yielded the world's oldest known leather shoe.

Set these together and the picture is coherent: wine emerges in the South Caucasus and the neighbouring highlands in the sixth millennium BCE, and by the fourth millennium it is being produced at scale in purpose-built installations and traded outward.

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Mesopotamia and Egypt

From the highlands the grape moved south into societies that could not easily grow it, and there it became a luxury import — which is precisely why it is so well documented.

In Mesopotamia, the hot alluvial plain suited the date palm and barley far better than the vine, and the everyday drink was barley beer. Wine came down the Euphrates from the northern hills and was accordingly expensive and prestigious. Administrative tablets record its receipt and allocation; the vine and the vineyard appear in Sumerian and Akkadian literature; and by the Assyrian period royal inscriptions and reliefs display wine as an instrument of imperial display.

In Egypt the record is visual and unusually rich. Wine appears in the Nile Delta from the earliest dynastic period; McGovern's analyses of jars from the tomb of the predynastic ruler known as Scorpion I at Abydos, dated to around 3150 BCE, identified a large consignment of resinated wine imported from the southern Levant — evidence of an organised long-distance wine trade at the very beginning of Egyptian history. Egyptians subsequently established their own Delta vineyards.

Tomb paintings from the New Kingdom — the tomb of the scribe Nakht at Thebes is the best known — show the whole operation in sequence: vines trained on trellises and arbours, pickers filling baskets, men treading grapes in a vat while steadying themselves on ropes hung above, juice draining into jars, and the jars sealed and stacked. The scenes are detailed enough to serve as a technical manual.

Most striking of all, the wine jars from Tutankhamun's tomb carry hieratic labels recording the regnal year of the vintage, the vineyard or estate, the region, and the name of the chief vintner — and sometimes a quality note. That is, in substance, an appellation and vintage system, in the fourteenth century BCE, roughly three thousand years before anything comparable appears in Europe.

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Greece and Rome

The Greeks did not invent wine. What they did was industrialise its trade and carry the vine across the Mediterranean.

Greek and Phoenician traders and colonists planted vines wherever they settled. Southern Italy was known to the Greeks as Oenotria — conventionally glossed as "the land of trained vines". Phocaean Greeks founded Massalia, modern Marseille, around 600 BCE, and from there the vine moved up the Rhône into what would become French wine country. Greek amphorae carrying wine are found across the whole Mediterranean and far up the rivers of temperate Europe, and the shapes and stamps of those amphorae let archaeologists reconstruct trade routes with considerable precision.

The Greeks also gave the grape its mythology — Dionysus, god of the vine and of ecstatic release, whose worship carried a myth of the vine's introduction to Greece. That is myth, and it should be read as myth. The archaeology places wine in the Caucasus thousands of years before Dionysus.

Rome turned viticulture into a technical discipline and wrote it down. Cato the Elder, Varro and above all Columella, in his first-century De Re Rustica, set out planting densities, trellising systems, pruning regimes, soil selection, propagation by layering and cuttings, and the economics of a vineyard. Pliny the Elder devoted an entire book of his Natural History to the vine and to wine, cataloguing varieties and regions and arguing about which were best. These are practical manuals, and much of what they describe — grafting, cutting propagation, matching variety to site — is recognisably modern practice.

Roman expansion carried the vine to Hispania, Gaul, the Rhine and Mosel, the Danube and Britain, establishing vineyards in places that are still wine regions two thousand years later. One frequently repeated story deserves a label: the emperor Domitian is reported by Suetonius to have issued an edict in the late first century ordering provincial vineyards cut back, supposedly to protect Italian producers or to free land for grain. The edict is attested; how far it was enforced, and whether it had any real effect on provincial viticulture, is disputed by historians and there is little evidence that it did much.

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Monasteries and the Medieval Vineyard

When Roman administration receded, viticulture in much of Europe survived in the institution best equipped to maintain a perennial crop across generations: the monastery.

Wine was needed for the Eucharist, so a religious house had a permanent reason to grow it. But the monasteries did far more than keep a sacramental supply going. Benedictine and especially Cistercian houses held land in perpetuity, kept written records, and had a stable labour force able to carry out work whose payoff lay decades ahead. A vine takes years to come into full bearing and can live for a century; a monastic community was one of the few medieval institutions with a planning horizon to match.

The Cistercians in Burgundy did something with lasting consequences. Working the same slopes for generation after generation and recording what they observed, they noticed that wine from one parcel differed consistently from wine from a parcel a few hundred metres away, year after year, even when the vines and the winemaking were identical. They walled and named those parcels. The Clos de Vougeot, enclosed by Cistercians from the twelfth century onward, is the emblem of this. The Burgundian climat system — a mosaic of individually named vineyard plots — descends directly from that monastic fieldwork, and the whole modern idea of terroir, of place as a determinant of a wine's character, is its intellectual descendant.

Monasteries also preserved and propagated grape varieties. A cultivated grape variety is a clone: it is propagated by cuttings, not by seed, because seedlings do not come true. A named variety therefore survives only if somebody keeps taking cuttings, year after year, without interruption. That unglamorous continuity, maintained through the medieval centuries in monastic vineyards, is why varieties with a documented history running back many hundreds of years still exist.

The story is not exclusively European or exclusively about wine. Across the medieval Islamic world, where wine was religiously restricted, the vine remained a major crop for table grapes and raisins, and Arab and Persian agronomists wrote about its cultivation in detail. The dried-fruit trade of Central Asia, Persia and the eastern Mediterranean is continuous from antiquity to the present, and the varieties it selected for — seedless, thin-skinned, high in sugar — are the ancestors of the sultanas and raisins in a modern supermarket.

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Across the Atlantic

The vine crossed the Atlantic with the Spanish, and the story splits sharply between the two halves of the Americas for reasons that turned out to matter enormously.

In Spanish America, it worked. Vines followed the conquest into Mexico within a few decades of contact, and from there down the Pacific coast into Peru, Chile and Argentina by the middle of the sixteenth century. The workhorse variety, known as the Mission grape in North America, País in Chile and Criolla Chica in Argentina, has been identified as the Spanish variety Listán Prieto, now nearly extinct in Spain itself but preserved across the Americas — a colonial cutting outliving its parent. Franciscan missions carried it north through Baja California and into Alta California from 1769 onward, and it was the basis of California winemaking until the second half of the nineteenth century.

In English North America, it failed, repeatedly and expensively. The Virginia colony legislated in 1619 that every householder should plant grapevines. Colonists imported European vines for two centuries. The vines died. Thomas Jefferson, who wanted more than almost anything to make good wine at Monticello, never succeeded with vinifera.

Nobody at the time understood why, and the answer is the hinge of this entire article. Eastern North America is the native home of a set of grape pests and diseases against which the American wild grapes — Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia, Vitis rupestris, Vitis aestivalis, Vitis rotundifolia — had evolved defences over millions of years, and against which the European vine had none: phylloxera, downy mildew, powdery mildew, black rot and Pierce's disease. A European vine planted in Virginia was being asked to survive an ecosystem it had never encountered.

What eastern growers eventually did instead was cultivate the natives. Concord, selected by Ephraim Wales Bull in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1840s and introduced in the following decade, is a Vitis labrusca selection, and it became the basis of the American grape juice and jelly industry — and of the purple grape juice used in the vascular trials described in our Polyphenols and Vascular Health article. Bull, in one of horticulture's bleaker footnotes, made almost nothing from it; his gravestone reads that he sowed and others reaped. Muscadine (Vitis rotundifolia), including the bronze Scuppernong, remained the grape of the American South.

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The Phylloxera Catastrophe

The traffic across the Atlantic ran both ways, and in the middle of the nineteenth century it ran the wrong way.

European botanists and vine breeders had been importing American vines — partly out of curiosity, partly hoping for resistance to the powdery mildew that had arrived in the 1840s. Faster steamships shortened the crossing enough that live insects on live rootstock could now survive the journey. Some time in the late 1850s or early 1860s, one of those consignments carried Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, the grape phylloxera: a tiny aphid-like insect, native to eastern North America, with a complicated life cycle that includes a root-feeding form.

The first French vineyards began dying in the southern Rhône around 1863. Vines lost vigour, leaves yellowed, and within two or three years the plants were dead, with the damage spreading outward from a centre. Nobody knew why. Growers proposed everything from soil exhaustion to divine punishment. The insect was identified in 1868 by the Montpellier botanist Jules-Émile Planchon, who found it by digging up vines at the edge of a dying patch — where the roots were still alive and covered with the insects — rather than at the centre, where everything was already dead and the phylloxera had moved on. The American entomologist Charles Valentine Riley, working in Missouri, confirmed that the insect was the same species that lived harmlessly on American vines, and connected the two halves of the puzzle.

Why harmlessly on one continent and catastrophically on the other? Because American Vitis species and phylloxera evolved together. American vine roots respond to feeding by forming a corky protective layer that walls off the damage. Vitis vinifera, which had never met the insect, forms no such barrier: the feeding wounds stay open, secondary fungal and bacterial infections enter, and the root system rots away. The vine starves.

The scale of what followed is difficult to overstate. Over roughly three decades the epidemic destroyed the majority of France's vineyards and then swept through Spain, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Austria-Hungary and beyond, and eventually reached almost every wine region in the world. Rural economies collapsed. Emigration from wine-growing regions rose sharply. The French government offered a very large prize for a workable cure, and received a flood of proposals — burying a live toad beneath each vine was among the more memorable. Flooding vineyards in winter worked where the land was flat enough and water was available. Injecting carbon disulphide into the soil worked, at ruinous expense and considerable danger. Neither was a general answer. Granett and colleagues set out the modern entomology of the insect and its management in the Annual Review of Entomology in 2001.

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The Great Grafting, and What Survived Ungrafted

The solution came from the same continent as the problem, and it was fiercely resisted before it was universally adopted.

The proposal — associated with the Bordeaux grower Leo Laliman and with Gaston Bazille, and developed at Montpellier by Planchon and others — was to stop trying to kill the insect and instead give the European vine roots it could not damage: graft Vitis vinifera scions onto rootstocks of resistant American species. The top of the plant, which produces the fruit, stays European. The roots, which the insect attacks, are American. Historians of the period call this the "American" faction, against the "chemical" faction who wanted to poison the insect in the soil.

The resistance was fierce and not entirely irrational. Growers feared American roots would taint the wine with the "foxy" flavour of labrusca grapes — a fear that proved unfounded, since the fruit is entirely the work of the grafted European scion. There were fears of importing yet more American diseases, which was reasonable given how the catastrophe had started; downy mildew did indeed arrive this way. And there was the sheer cost and labour of digging up and replanting an entire national vineyard, vine by vine.

It worked. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Europe's vineyards were reconstituted on grafted roots, using Vitis riparia, Vitis rupestris and Vitis berlandieri and, increasingly, hybrids of them bred to suit particular soils — especially the high-lime soils of Champagne and Cognac, where pure American species struggled with chlorosis. Rootstock breeding became, and remains, a scientific discipline of its own.

The consequence is still with you every time you drink wine. Virtually every Vitis vinifera vine planted anywhere in the world today is a grafted plant: a European variety growing on American roots, joined at a visible knuckle just above the soil. It is the largest and most successful agricultural intervention of the nineteenth century, and it is invisible to almost everyone who benefits from it. George Gale's history Dying on the Vine, published by the University of California Press, tells the story in full.

A few places escaped, and they are prized for it. Chile never got phylloxera — protected by the Atacama desert, the Andes and the Pacific — and its vines still grow on their own roots. Chile also turned out to be holding something else: in 1994 the French ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquot identified vines long grown in Chile as Merlot to be Carménère, a Bordeaux variety believed extinct since phylloxera. It had been exported before the epidemic and quietly survived on the other side of the world. Pockets of ungrafted vines also persist in deep sandy soils, which phylloxera cannot navigate — Colares in Portugal is the classic case — and in a handful of parcels that the epidemic simply missed, including some of the oldest surviving vines in Australia's Barossa Valley and a famous ungrafted plot in Champagne.

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Table, Wine and Raisin Grapes Part Company

The 2023 genomic work showed that table and wine grapes were separate from the moment of domestication. Millennia of selection widened the gap, because the three uses want opposite things.

A wine grape is selected for small berries with a high ratio of skin to pulp, since skin carries the colour, tannin and aroma; for thick skins; for high sugar to produce alcohol; and for high acidity to give structure and stability. Eaten fresh, a serious wine grape is small, intensely flavoured, often seedy and frequently too tart to be enjoyable.

A table grape is selected for the opposite: large berries, thin tender skins, firm crisp flesh that holds up to weeks of shipping, mild sweetness, low acidity, attractive uniform appearance, and — overwhelmingly, in the modern market — seedlessness. Seedlessness in grapes arises mainly through stenospermocarpy, in which the seed is fertilised but its embryo aborts and the seed coat never hardens, leaving a soft trace instead of a pip. Because a stenospermocarpic grape produces no viable seed, such varieties historically could be perpetuated only by cuttings, and modern breeding of new seedless varieties depends on embryo rescue in tissue culture.

A raisin grape is a table grape pushed further in the same direction: seedless, very high in sugar so that the dried fruit is sweet, and thin-skinned so it dries evenly without cracking. Raisin production is ancient. Dried grapes appear in the Hebrew Bible and in classical sources, they kept indefinitely without refrigeration and travelled well, and the eastern Mediterranean and Persia had established drying traditions long before the medieval period. The word currant — for the tiny dried grape, not the berry — is a worn-down form of "raisin of Corinth", after the Greek port through which the Black Corinth grape was shipped: a piece of trade history preserved in a supermarket label. Málaga in Spain and Smyrna (modern İzmir) in Anatolia were the other great historic raisin ports.

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Thompson Seedless

One variety dominates the modern table and raisin trade to a degree that has no parallel in any other fruit, and it arrived in California almost by accident.

The variety is Sultanina, an ancient seedless white grape of Ottoman and Persian lineage, long grown in Anatolia and Central Asia for drying. In 1872 a farmer named William Thompson planted cuttings of it in Sutter County, California, obtained from an eastern American nursery under a different and evidently mistaken name. The vine thrived in the Central Valley's hot dry summers — a near-perfect match for a variety selected over centuries in the dry summers of Anatolia — and neighbours began propagating it from Thompson's plants. It has been called Thompson Seedless in America ever since.

Its reach is remarkable. It became, and remains, the backbone of the California raisin industry; it is a major fresh table grape; it is used for juice and concentrate; and it is grown for wine blending and distillation. In much of the world "raisin" means a dried Thompson Seedless, and "sultana" means the same grape dried by a different method. When you eat a raisin, the odds are good you are eating a clone of a vine that has been propagated by cuttings, unchanged, since long before Thompson was born.

That is not a figure of speech. Because grapes are propagated vegetatively, every Thompson Seedless vine on earth is genetically the same individual as every other, give or take accumulated somatic mutations. The same is true of Chardonnay, of Cabernet Sauvignon, of Concord. A vineyard is a set of very old clones, kept alive by continuous cutting.

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The Modern Industry and an Old Vulnerability

Grapes are now among the most widely grown fruit crops in the world, cultivated on every inhabited continent. China has become the largest grower of table grapes by a wide margin, a transformation of the last few decades. Italy, France and Spain remain the leading wine producers, joined by substantial industries in the United States, Argentina, Chile, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. Turkey, the United States and Iran lead raisin production. Southern-hemisphere growing has made fresh table grapes a year-round supermarket item in the north, which is a genuinely recent development.

Against that success sits the vulnerability that Myles and colleagues identified in their 2011 genomic study, and it is the note this history should end on.

Their finding was that grapevine retains substantial genetic diversity — the domestication bottleneck was weak — but that this diversity sits inside a dense network of close pedigree relationships created by crosses among a small set of elite cultivars. First-degree relationships turn out to be rare between wine and table grapes, and rare between grapes from geographically distant regions, confirming that the great divisions in the crop are real and old. Their conclusion was that although the diversity survived domestication, very little of it has ever been explored. Vegetative propagation, they wrote, was a double-edged sword: it guaranteed true-breeding varieties, and in doing so it removed the incentive to make new ones by crossing.

The result is an industry built on a small number of extremely old clones, facing severe and growing pathogen pressure — the reason a modern vineyard is sprayed as heavily as it is, discussed in Pesticides and Choking Safety. Phylloxera made this argument once already, in the most expensive way possible. Myles and colleagues argued that the long-term sustainability of the grape and wine industries will depend on actually using the crop's natural genetic diversity rather than continuing to propagate the same handful of medieval clones.

It is a fitting end for a plant that was domesticated twice, eleven thousand years ago, at the very beginning of agriculture: the grape's deep past is not settled history but a live resource, and the wild vines still growing along the rivers of Georgia and Anatolia may yet turn out to matter as much as the famous names in the vineyard.

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Research Papers and References

1. Dong Y, Duan S, Xia Q, Liang Z, et al. Dual domestications and origin of traits in grapevine evolution. Science. 2023;379(6635):892–901. — doi:10.1126/science.add8655
2. McGovern P, Jalabadze M, Batiuk S, Callahan MP, et al. Early Neolithic wine of Georgia in the South Caucasus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2017;114(48):E10309–E10318. — doi:10.1073/pnas.1714728114
3. Barnard H, Dooley AN, Areshian G, Gasparyan B, Faull KF. Chemical evidence for wine production around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science. 2011;38(5):977–984. — doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.11.012
4. McGovern PE, Glusker DL, Exner LJ, Voigt MM. Neolithic resinated wine. Nature. 1996;381(6582):480–481. — doi:10.1038/381480a0
5. Myles S, Boyko AR, Owens CL, Brown PJ, et al. Genetic structure and domestication history of the grape. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108(9):3530–3535. — doi:10.1073/pnas.1009363108
6. Arroyo-García R, Ruiz-García L, Bolling L, Ocete R, et al. Multiple origins of cultivated grapevine (Vitis vinifera L. ssp. sativa) based on chloroplast DNA polymorphisms. Molecular Ecology. 2006;15(12):3707–3714. — doi:10.1111/j.1365-294X.2006.03049.x
7. This P, Lacombe T, Thomas MR. Historical origins and genetic diversity of wine grapes. Trends in Genetics. 2006;22(9):511–519. — doi:10.1016/j.tig.2006.07.008
8. Granett J, Walker MA, Kocsis L, Omer AD. Biology and management of grape phylloxera. Annual Review of Entomology. 2001;46:387–412. — doi:10.1146/annurev.ento.46.1.387
9. Gale G. The underground battle: grafting on American rootstock. In: Dying on the Vine: How Phylloxera Transformed Wine. University of California Press; 2011:120–162. — doi:10.1525/9780520948853-008
10. Campbell C. Phylloxera: How Wine Was Saved for the World. HarperCollins; 2004. — a full-length narrative history of the epidemic and the grafting solution. (Book; no DOI.)
11. Zohary D, Hopf M, Weiss E. Domestication of Plants in the Old World. 4th ed. Oxford University Press; 2012. — the standard reference on Near Eastern crop domestication, including Vitis. (Book; no DOI.)
12. McGovern PE. Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture. Princeton University Press; 2003. — the book-length account by the author of the Georgian and Hajji Firuz residue studies. (Book; no DOI.)
13. Live literature search — grapevine domestication genomics: PubMed: grapevine domestication genomics
14. Live literature search — archaeological evidence for ancient wine: PubMed: ancient wine residue archaeology
15. Live literature search — phylloxera and rootstock resistance: PubMed: phylloxera and rootstock resistance

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Connections

• Grapes — the main topic page: varieties, nutrition and practical guidance.
• Grapes — Benefits Deep Dive — the four evidence articles.
• Resveratrol Honestly — including the French Paradox, a much more recent chapter of the same story.
• Polyphenols and Vascular Health — the compounds selection produced, and what they do.
• Raisins, Blood Sugar and Teeth — where the raisin trade of Corinth and Smyrna ends up.
• Pesticides and Choking Safety — why an ancient clonal crop needs so much protection.
• Alcohol — the other half of the wine story, told honestly.
• Olive Oil — the other great Mediterranean perennial crop with a parallel history.
• Apples — another ancient clonally propagated fruit, domesticated along the Silk Road.
• Resveratrol — the vine's own defence chemical.
• Anthocyanins — the pigments whose selection the 2023 genomic study traced.
• All Food — the complete food index.

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