The Wine Blokes

Definition:Vitis Vinifera is the botanical name for the grape-bearing vine that is responsible for most of the world ’s quality wines.

History:

Wild grapes were harvested by foragers and early farmers. For thousands of years, the fruit has been harvested for both medicinal and nutritional value; its history is intimately entwined with the history of wine.

Changes in pip shape (narrower in domesticated forms) and distribution point to domestication occurring about 3500-3000 BC, 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, coming to North America around the 1600s, and to Africa, South America and Australia. In North America it formed hybrids with species from Vitis genus native to that region; some of these were intentional hybrids created to combat Phylloxera, an insect pest which affected the European grapevine to a much greater extent than North American ones and in fact managed to devastate European wine production in 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 including California and The Pacific Northwest States. But due to the research of Konstantin Frank, it is now widely grown even in the harsher climate of New York State, western Michigan and southern Ontario. Dr. Helmut Becker’s work in the early 1980s brought Vitis vinifera to the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia.

In March 2007, scientists from Australia’s CSIRO working in the Cooperative Research Centre for Viticulture reported they found that “extremely rare and independent mutations in two genes [VvMYBA1 and VvMYBA2] [of red grapes] produced a single white grapevine that was the parent of almost all of the world’s white grape varieties. If only one gene had been mutated, most grapes would still be red and we would not have the more than 3000 white grape cultivars available today.