Fiorenza Gracci, journalist for the science magazine Epsiloon today decrypts a recent study, carried out by a team of Italian geneticists. The result of their study is fascinating.
franceinfo: During these festive days and libations, wines are very present on our tables, but we do not always know where they come from, what their origin is. Now do we know?
Fiorenza Gracci: This is what a study reveals for the first time: all European grapes, whether Merlot from Bordeaux wines or Pinot Noir from Burgundy wines, all have one and the same origin: the Middle East, some leaves between the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and the Levant. This is where the wild vine was domesticated over four millennia ago.
It is a team of Italian geneticists who has just established it after studying 204 varieties of vine, cultivated and wild. Such a great deal of work had never been done before. It was necessary to compare more than 7 million mutations present in the DNA of all these plants, to establish their degree of relatedness and to go back to their origin, which until now remained questionable.
Result: the study shows that all European grape varieties, all, come from the same region of Asia. And in particular the most emblematic, there are about ten of them, who alone are at the heart of the global wine industry – merlot, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon, grenache, syrah etc. …
Does that mean that European wine was born in the Middle East?
Yes and no. So, over the past two millennia, over the course of trade and migration, the original vines have been imported to the west, throughout Europe. But what this study also shows: is that wherever these oriental vines were planted, each time the farmers crossed them with wild European varieties, which had always been there. And which had the advantage of being more adapted to the local climate.
All these crosses therefore made the vine more resistant, changed its color, its flavor and ended up forging the incredible genetic diversity of European grape varieties. The study also underlines that the crucible of all these blends is Italy and France, which are historically the two main producers of wine.
Do the table grapes have the same origin?
Absolutely, from the start we cultivated part of the vines to produce grapes to eat. And the wine growers chose roughly the same selection criteria: that is, the size of the grapes and the amount of flesh in relation to the seeds.
Moreover, in all the domestic varieties of vines, those that are cultivated, geneticists have found a set of genes, very precisely on chromosome 17, which produce large grains with small seeds.
It is therefore thanks to these genes that these grapes have been able to survive the centuries and that they still accompany us on our tables and in our glasses …
Source: Nature Communications (December 2021).