The Grape We Have Grown to Love

• Posted: February 26, 2008
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• Author: James DeRosa
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• Filed under: Agricultural
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• Tags: Grape, Variety, Vitis vinifera

Wine grape varieties represent only a small portion of a family of more than 600 species. Each grape variety has its own exclusive properties including:

• Acidity
• Color
• Flavors
• Skin Thickness
• Size
• Yield

Of these many different types of grapes, the best wine grape is the European Vitis vinifera. It is a liana (woody climber) growing to 35 m tall, with flaky bark. The leaves are alternate, palmately lobed, 5–20 cm long, and broad. The fruit is a berry, known as a grape; the wild species is 6 mm in diameter and ripens dark purple to blackish, with a pale wax bloom. In cultivated plants it is usually much larger, up to 3 cm long, and can be green, red, or purple.

The European Vitis is considered optimal because it has the right balance of sugar and acid needed to create a good fermented wine, without the addition of sugar or water. It has been said that a wine is only as good as the grape; a
poor winemaker can ruin good grapes, but a good winemaker isn’t going to make great wine from inferior grapes.

The grapes’ history is intimately entwined with the history of wine, with wild grapes being first harvested by foragers and early farmers. For thousands of years, the fruit has been harvested for both its medicinal and nutritional value. Changes in pip shape (which is more narrow in domesticated forms) and distribution point actually began occurring around 3500-3000 BC. It was around this time that domestication of wild grapes took place in southwest Asia or southern Transcaucasia (Armenia and Georgia). Cultivation of the domesticated grape spread to other parts of the Old World in pre-historic or early historic times.

Grapes followed European colonies around the world from Africa, to South America and Australia, when they arrived on North American shores around 1600. In North America, hybrids were formed with species from the Vitis genus native to that region. Some of these were intentional hybrids created to combat Phylloxera, an insect pest which affected the European grapevine. The effects there were far greater than in North America, and in fact managed to devastate European wine production in only a matter of years. Later, North American rootstocks became widely used to graft V. vinifera cultivars so as to withstand the presence of phylloxera.

In North America, growing Vitis vinifera was limited mostly to the relatively mild West Coast, starting in New Mexico and continuing into California and The Pacific Northwest States. However, due to the research of Konstantin Frank, it is now widely grown in harsher climates, such as New York State, western Michigan and southern Ontario. Dr. Helmut Becker’s work in the early 1980s even brought Vitis vinifera to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.

Read more about Vitis vinifera here.

Side note on “Variety”

The word “varietal” means “of or pertaining to a variety.” Types of grapes are “varieties”. Wines made from a single variety are varietal wines. So, for example, a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon wine is a varietal. The cabernet sauvignon grape, zinfandel grape and merlot grape are varieties of grapes. According to US law, as long as it has at least 75% of a particular variety of grape, the wine can be labeled as that variety.

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