Origin: The Caucasus region, between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea (modern-day Georgia and Armenia).
The grape is amongst the most consequential plants ever to pass into human cultivation, for from a single domesticated species came not only a fruit but an entire civilisation of wine, with all its attendant religion, commerce, and art. Vitis vinifera, the wine grape, was domesticated from its wild ancestor Vitis vinifera subspecies sylvestris in the South Caucasus, the mountainous country between the Black Sea and the Caspian that today forms Georgia, Armenia, and the borderlands of Azerbaijan and eastern Anatolia. The wild vine is dioecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants, so that only some vines set fruit; the great achievement of domestication was the selection of hermaphroditic vines that pollinate themselves and crop reliably, together with the choice of plants bearing larger, sweeter, juicier berries. Because the grapevine is propagated from cuttings, every prized variety could be cloned and carried, and the cultivars that resulted, from the pale Sultana to the dark Shiraz, were perpetuated unchanged across millennia and thousands of miles.
The antiquity of the Caucasian tradition is documented in the soil itself. Archaeological sites in eastern Georgia have yielded fragments of large clay fermentation vessels, the qvevri, stained with tartaric acid, the chemical fingerprint of grape juice, alongside grape pips and pressed skins, and the chemical evidence of deliberate winemaking reaches back to around 6000 BCE, with signs of wild grape use pushing the human relationship with the vine to roughly 8000 BCE. This makes Caucasian winemaking, in all likelihood, the oldest continuously practised fermentation tradition on earth, and the qvevri method, in which whole crushed clusters are buried in earthenware to ferment slowly underground, is still followed in Georgia today, essentially unchanged across eight thousand years.
V. vinifera proved extraordinarily plastic under cultivation, diverging into the many thousands of named varieties that now exist, table grapes bred for sweetness and good keeping, drying grapes for raisins and sultanas, and the great wine grapes whose names, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Tempranillo, Riesling, Nebbiolo, define the fine-wine world. The fruit is unique amongst the great domesticates in the sheer breadth of its uses, for it is eaten fresh, dried into raisins, currants, and sultanas, pressed into juice, fermented into wine and distilled into brandy, boiled down without fermentation into the sweet molasses the Persians call shireh and the Turks pekmez, soured into vinegar and verjuice, and even valued for its broad, pliable leaves, which are wrapped about rice and herbs across the whole of the eastern Mediterranean. No other plant has given the human table so many distinct things from a single fruit.
From its Caucasian cradle the cultivated vine spread first into the great river civilisations of the Near East. By around 3000 BCE grape growing and winemaking had reached Mesopotamia and the Nile Delta of Egypt, where viticulture became an art of the elite; Egyptian tomb paintings at Saqqara and Luxor depict the treading of grapes, the sealing of amphorae, and the labelling of wine jars with vintage, vineyard, and maker, the earliest wine-labelling system in the world. It was the Phoenicians, however, the great seafaring merchants of the Levantine coast at Tyre and Sidon, who turned the grape into a Mediterranean crop. From around 1500 BCE they carried vine cuttings, winemaking knowledge, and the Levantine habit of cooking with the vine to every port they founded, to Carthage, to Cyprus and Sardinia, to Marseille and to Cadiz, planting the seed of viticulture along the entire northern shore of Africa and the southern coast of Europe.
The Greeks inherited this Phoenician inheritance and raised it into philosophy, religion, and social ritual, organising the symposium around diluted wine and making Dionysus one of the central figures of their pantheon; Greek wine, shipped in distinctive amphorae, travelled the length of the Mediterranean. Rome then transformed Greek wine culture into an imperial agricultural system, and it was the legions and colonists of Rome who carried the vine to the lands that would become its greatest homes. Roman viticulture planted the vineyards of Gaul, Hispania, the Rhine and the Moselle, and even Britain, and the agronomists Columella and Pliny the Elder documented hundreds of grape varieties and the techniques of their cultivation. The great wine regions of modern France, Spain, Germany, and Italy are, in the most direct sense, the descendants of Roman plantings.
The rise of Islam after the seventh century CE recast the grape's role across a vast swathe of its range. Where the Quranic prohibition of khamr, intoxicating drink, suppressed winemaking, the grape did not vanish but was transformed into a food, and the Arab agricultural revolution carried drying and table varieties across North Africa, into Al-Andalus, and along the trans-Saharan caravan routes into the pre-Saharan oases of Morocco, where the golden raisins of the Draa Valley became a prized commodity. The grape became raisins and currants, molasses and verjuice, and the vine leaf became a cooking vessel; the Ottomans later gathered these traditions and spread the stuffed vine leaf, the dolma, across an empire that stretched from Hungary to Yemen.
The final and greatest dispersal was the oceanic one of the colonial age. Spanish missionaries carried the vine to Mexico and South America and up the Pacific coast; the Dutch East India Company planted the first vines at the Cape of Good Hope within three years of founding the Cape Colony in 1652, and French Huguenot refugees reinforced the young Cape winelands in 1688. German Lutheran settlers fleeing Silesia and Prussia planted Shiraz in South Australia's Barossa Valley in the 1840s, on vines that, having escaped the phylloxera blight that devastated Europe, are amongst the oldest in the world today. French enologists introduced Malbec to the high vineyards of Mendoza in Argentina in the 1850s, and in the same decade Ephraim Wales Bull bred the hardy Concord grape from native American Vitis labrusca stock in Massachusetts, giving the United States a grape culture of its own. By the late twentieth century the vine had circled the globe, and the Judgement of Paris of 1976, in which California wines bested the grand crus of Bordeaux and Burgundy, confirmed that the grape had made new homelands wherever the climate would receive it.
The grape stands amongst the most economically important crops in the world, cultivated on roughly 7.5 million hectares across every inhabited continent, and it is unrivalled in the diversity of the things it yields from a single fruit. It is eaten fresh as a table grape, dried into raisins, sultanas, and currants, pressed into juice, fermented into wine and distilled into brandy, grappa, pisco, and arak, boiled down into the sweet molasses of pekmez and shireh, soured into vinegar and pressed unripe into verjuice, and its broad leaves are brined and wrapped about rice and meat from Greece to Iran. Wine alone constitutes a global industry worth many hundreds of billions, and the names of grape varieties and the regions that grow them, Bordeaux and Burgundy, Rioja and the Mosel, the Barossa and Mendoza and Napa, have become a language of place and prestige understood the world over.
No other fruit has generated a comparable body of cultural, religious, philosophical, and culinary literature. The grape and its wine sit at the symbolic heart of several of the world's great traditions: the Eucharist of Christianity, the Kiddush of Judaism, the ecstatic religion of the Greek Dionysus, and the legal discourse of Islam concerning the prohibition of intoxicants. In Persian poetry the grape and the cup are amongst the most enduring of all images, appearing in countless verses, most famously the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, as metaphors for spiritual longing, earthly beauty, and divine mystery, and the vine is named in the Hebrew Bible more often than any other plant. In the kitchen the grape ranges from the rustic to the refined, from the harvest breads leavened with fresh must, the schiacciata all'uva of Tuscany and the mosbolletjies of the Cape, to the great wine-braised dishes of the European table, coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon, in which the fermented juice of the grape becomes not a flavouring but the very medium of the cooking. Few plants have shaped human ritual, commerce, and appetite so completely.
Historical Journey of Grapes
Kakheti, Georgia — c. 8000 BCE
In the fertile river valleys of Kakheti, the wine heartland of eastern Georgia, Neolithic communities took the wild mountain vine and began the long work of domestication that would give the world Vitis vinifera, selecting the self-pollinating, sweeter-fruited plants that crop reliably and propagating them, vine by vine, from cuttings. The archaeological sites of Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora have yielded the oldest confirmed winemaking evidence on earth: fragments of large clay vessels stained with tartaric acid, the chemical signature of grape juice, alongside grape pips and pressed skins, with the firm evidence reaching back to around 6000 BCE and signs of earlier wild grape use pushing the human relationship with the vine to roughly 8000 BCE. The Georgian method, in which whole crushed clusters, skins, stalks, and pips together, are sealed into the great earthenware qvevri and buried to the neck in the earth to ferment slowly underground, is still followed today essentially unchanged across eight thousand years, and it was inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. The grape was a food here as well as a wine: the same Kakhetian vineyards gave churchkhela, the candle-shaped sweet in which strings of walnuts are dipped again and again in thickened grape must until they set into a chewy, fruit-leather sheath, a portable confection of pure grape and nut still made at every Georgian harvest. With reason the Georgians call their country the cradle of wine.
Nile Delta, Egypt — c. 3000 BCE
Grape cultivation reached the Nile Delta around 3000 BCE, carried south and west from the Levant by Canaanite and Phoenician traders, and in Egypt the vine became an art of the elite, bound up with kingship, ritual, and the afterlife. The tomb paintings of Saqqara and Luxor record the whole process in vivid detail: labourers treading the grapes in great vats, the must poured into pottery amphorae, the jars sealed with clay and set to ferment. Wine jars recovered from the tomb of the predynastic ruler known as Scorpion I at Abydos, dating to around 3150 BCE, show that wine was at first a prestige import from the Levant and then, within a few generations, a domestic product of the Egyptian court, the hot and well-irrigated land of the Western Delta proving ideal for the vine. The royal vineyards produced wine for the temples, for the pharaonic feasts, and above all for the tomb, where sealed amphorae were laid up to sustain the dead through eternity. Most remarkably, the Egyptians inscribed their wine jars with the year of the vintage, the name of the vineyard, and the name of the winemaker, the earliest system of wine labelling known anywhere in the world and a sign of how seriously this borrowed Caucasian fruit was already taken on the banks of the Nile.
Sidon & Tyre, Phoenicia (modern Lebanon) — c. 1500 BCE
From their great cities of Sidon and Tyre on the Levantine coast the Phoenicians, the most accomplished seafaring merchants of the ancient Mediterranean, carried the vine westward and planted viticulture along the whole sweep of the inland sea. Wherever they founded a trading colony, at Carthage on the African shore, at Cadiz and Malaga in Iberia, at Marseille in Gaul, and across Cyprus and Sardinia, they brought not merely amphorae of wine to sell but living vine cuttings, the knowledge of how to grow and ferment them, and the whole Levantine culture of cooking with the grape. It was along these Phoenician routes that the eastern Mediterranean practice of wrapping food in vine leaves travelled outward, the large, pliable leaves serving as edible parcels for mixtures of grain, herbs, and meat; the warak enab of Lebanon, vine leaves rolled tight around rice, herbs, and lamb and braised until tender, descends directly from this ancient Levantine tradition and remains one of the defining dishes of the region. The Bekaa Valley behind the Phoenician coast still produces arak, the clear, anise-scented spirit distilled from grapes by techniques refined over the millennia, the ouzo and raki of the wider region tracing their lineage to the same root. Through Phoenician sails the grape ceased to be a fruit of the Near East alone and became the shared inheritance of the entire Mediterranean world.
Athens, Ancient Greece — c. 800 BCE
Greece inherited the Phoenician wine tradition and raised it into philosophy, religion, and the most refined social ritual of the ancient world. The symposium, the ordered drinking gathering that followed the meal and gave rise to Plato's dialogues and to the lyric verse of Sappho and Pindar, was built around wine carefully diluted with water, around debate, music, and measured pleasure, and to the Greeks the man who drank his wine unmixed was a barbarian. Dionysus, the god of wine, of ecstasy, and of transformation, rose to become one of the most important and most unsettling figures of the Greek pantheon, his cult carrying the divine madness that the grape could induce. Greek wine was traded the length of the Mediterranean in amphorae of distinctive regional shapes, so precisely characteristic that archaeologists today trace the routes of Greek commerce by the broken jars left on the sea floor. The grape entered the Greek kitchen as a food as well as a drink, above all at the harvest, when the fresh must was thickened with flour into moustalevria, the grape-must pudding set in little bowls and dusted with cinnamon and walnuts; the same must was reduced without fermentation into petimezi, the dark grape molasses used as a sweetener, and worked into stafidopsomo, the raisin bread of the season. These harvest preparations, born when the presses ran and there was more juice than could be made into wine, persist in the Greek countryside to this day.
Rome, Roman Empire — c. 100 BCE
Rome took the wine culture of the Greeks and turned it into an imperial agricultural system of immense scale, planting the vine across the whole of the empire and laying the foundations of European viticulture as it survives today. Roman legions and colonists carried vine cuttings from Britain to Mesopotamia and from the Rhine to the Nile, and the agronomists of Rome set down their knowledge in works of lasting authority: Columella's De Re Rustica and Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia between them document hundreds of grape varieties and the techniques of trellising, pruning, fermenting, and ageing. Roman cooking drew on the grape at every level of the meal. Mulsum, wine sweetened with honey and warmed with spice, opened the banquet as an aperitif; defrutum and the more concentrated sapa, grape must boiled down to a thick, dark syrup, served as both sweetener and preservative throughout the kitchen, lending savoury dishes a sweet-sour depth; mustacei, the spiced little cakes kneaded with fresh grape must and bay, were baked at the vintage; and posca, sour wine or vinegar cut with water, was the cheap, thirst-quenching daily drink of the legionary on the march. The vineyards that Roman hands first planted in Gaul, Hispania, the Moselle, and the Italian peninsula are the direct ancestors of the great wine regions of modern France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, and the continuity of cultivation on much of that ground has scarcely been broken in two thousand years.
Isfahan, Persia (Iran) — c. 500 CE
Persia possessed an ancient wine tradition of its own, reaching back into the deep antiquity of the plateau, and the very word for wine in the European languages may share a root with the Georgian and Armenian terms for the drink, marking how closely the grape bound together the lands around the Caucasus. Under the Sassanid Empire and then, after the seventh century, under Islamic rule, the grape in Persia underwent a great transformation, from a wine fruit into a culinary ingredient of extraordinary versatility, as the prohibition of intoxicants turned the cook's attention from fermentation to every other use the fruit could serve. The grape was dried into raisins, the small seedless kishmish and the larger sorts, reduced over the fire into the dark molasses called shireh, pressed unripe into the sharp green verjuice ab-ghooreh that the Persian kitchen prizes as a souring agent, and soured fully into vinegar. At the same time the grape and the wine-cup became the supreme metaphors of Persian poetry, in the verses of Hafez, of Rumi, and above all of Omar Khayyam, where, despite or perhaps because of the prohibition, the call to drink stood for spiritual longing, for the fleeting beauty of the world, and for the mystery of the divine. The grape's finest expression on the Persian table is shirin polo, the jewelled sweet rice of weddings and the Nowruz new year, in which saffron-scented rice is layered with raisins, barberries, slivered almonds and pistachios, and candied orange peel, a dish that encodes the whole Persian genius for the balance of sweet, sour, and fragrant.
Draa Valley and Oasis Gardens, Morocco — c. 700 CE
The Arab conquest of the Maghreb in the late seventh century CE, and the agricultural reforms that followed under the Umayyads, carried the viticulture of Persia and the Levant westward into the pre-Saharan valleys of southern Morocco. Here the Islamic prohibition of wine turned the grape decisively towards drying, and the long, watered oases strung along the Draa, the Dades, and the Tafilalet rivers proved ideally suited to the cultivation of raisin grapes. The golden raisins of the Draa, the zbib n dra, became one of the most prized dried fruits of the trans-Saharan caravan trade: grown on oasis vines fed by the meltwaters of the High Atlas, spread to dry on the flat mud-brick rooftops of the ksour under the fierce Saharan sun, and carried north to the markets of Fez and Marrakesh and south across the desert into the Sahel along the very routes that bore gold, salt, and sorghum. That the grape and the sorghum should meet on the same caravan track is no accident, for the Draa stands precisely at the seam between the Mediterranean and the sub-Saharan agricultural worlds, and both crops define its cooking. The valley's great dish, seksu n dra, the Amazigh couscous rolled from sorghum rather than wheat, depends upon these raisins as one of its defining notes, the dried grapes plumped and made intensely sweet in the juices of the long-braised lamb tagine that crowns the grain. On a single terracotta platter the dried fruit of the oasis garden meets the grain of the desert floor, a marriage written by the trade routes themselves.
Constantinople (Istanbul), Ottoman Empire — c. 1200 CE
The Ottoman Empire gathered up the vine-leaf stuffing traditions of the Levant and the Greek world and carried them across an enormous territory that reached from Hungary to Yemen and from the Maghreb to the borders of Persia, spreading a single culinary idea across three continents. The Turkish word dolma, meaning simply 'stuffed', passed into dozens of languages as the term for the stuffed vine leaf and the stuffed vegetable alike, a direct and lasting mark of Ottoman culinary influence upon the whole eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. The sophisticated court kitchens of Constantinople systematised and refined these preparations into many forms: dolmades, the Greek version of cold rice-stuffed leaves dressed with lemon and olive oil and eaten as a meze, and warak enab, the hot Lebanese version rolled around rice and minced lamb and braised, stand at the head of dozens of regional variations differing in filling, in spicing, and in whether they are served warm or cool. Alongside the leaf, the Ottomans made the fruit itself into a staple sweetener through pekmez, the thick grape molasses produced by boiling down the must without fermentation, an honourable and permitted use of the grape that supplied sweetness for bread, for confectionery, and for the breakfast table long before cane sugar was cheap. Pekmez is still made across Turkey and the Balkans today, a direct survival of the Ottoman grape kitchen.
Málaga, Andalusia, Spain — c. 1492 CE
Spain's wine culture is amongst the oldest in Europe, for the Phoenicians planted vines at Gadir, the modern Cadiz, around 1100 BCE, and Roman Hispania produced wines that were shipped across the empire. Yet it was the long Moorish period, from the Arab conquest of 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492, that gave Andalusian grape cooking its most distinctive character. Although the Islamic prohibition of wine officially suppressed winemaking across Al-Andalus, the grape itself was cultivated as abundantly as ever, for the table, for raisins, and for the green verjuice, and the kitchens of Muslim Spain blended the Levantine, North African, and Iberian approaches to the fruit into something new. The finest survival of that fusion is ajo blanco, the chilled white soup of ground almonds, garlic, day-old bread, olive oil, and a little vinegar, traditionally served cold with sweet fresh Moscatel grapes floated on top, their bursts of cool sweetness set against the savoury richness of the almonds and the bite of the garlic. This is Andalusia's white gazpacho, the older, pre-tomato form of the dish, a preparation of unmistakable Moorish heritage that outlived the Reconquista and the expulsion that ended Muslim Spain to become one of the most refined and beloved summer dishes of the modern Spanish table.
Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa — c. 1655 CE
When the Dutch East India Company established the Cape Colony in 1652 as a refreshment station for its ships on the long passage to the Spice Islands, the planting of a vineyard followed almost at once, and within three years Jan van Riebeeck had set the first vines at the foot of Table Mountain. The young winelands grew quickly inland around Stellenbosch and Paarl, and above all around Franschhoek, the 'French corner', settled in 1688 by Huguenot refugees who brought with them a superior knowledge of viticulture and winemaking from their lost homeland. By the later eighteenth century the Constantia estate was producing a sweet wine of such celebrity that it was exported to the courts of Europe, requested by the exiled Napoleon on Saint Helena, and named admiringly by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility as a remedy for a disappointed heart. The grape entered the Cape Dutch kitchen as well as the cellar, most charmingly through mosbolletjies, the sweet bread rolls leavened with the wild yeasts of fresh grape must rather than baker's yeast and scented with aniseed, baked at the time of the vintage when the must ran freely. These fragrant, slightly chewy buns, still made across the Boland today, are a living link between the colonial Dutch table and the vineyards that the Company first planted, the harvest of the vine rising in the dough itself.
Bordeaux, France — c. 1700 CE
France inherited the viticulture of Rome and, over more than a millennium of patient cultivation, much of it carried out by the Benedictine and Cistercian monks who studied and mapped their vineyards plot by plot, refined it into the most exacting wine culture in the world, the foundation of the modern appellation system that ties a wine to its precise place of origin. By the eighteenth century Bordeaux and Burgundy were producing wines of a quality and consistency never before achieved, and at the same moment French cuisine was codifying the practice of cooking with wine into its classical repertoire. The supreme expression of that practice is coq au vin, in which a chicken is braised slowly in red Burgundy with lardons of bacon, pearl onions, and mushrooms until the meat is tender and the sauce is deep and glossy; here the wine is no mere flavouring but the very medium of the cooking, the braising liquid itself, reduced over hours into a sauce of extraordinary richness and depth. The dish, alongside its near relation boeuf bourguignon, travelled the world with the spread of French cooking to become amongst the most widely recognised of all wine-cooked dishes, and it shows the grape completing a circle, the fruit that the Romans first fermented on French soil now poured back into the pot to transform the humblest bird into a thing of great savour.
Douro Valley, Portugal — c. 1700 CE
The Douro Valley, climbing in dizzying terraces above the river in the mountainous north of Portugal, is one of the oldest demarcated wine regions in the world, its boundaries formally drawn in 1756 to protect the quality and the name of its most famous product. Here the grape is transformed into Port, the fortified wine made by arresting the fermentation partway with the addition of aguardente, the clear grape spirit, so that the wine retains much of the natural sweetness of the must whilst gaining strength and the capacity to age for decades. The making of Port shaped the whole landscape and economy of the valley, drawing English merchant houses to the river city of Porto and binding the region into the Atlantic wine trade. Beyond the bottle, the Douro kitchen uses the grape at every stage of its life: the table grapes eaten fresh in the heat of the September vintage, the must boiled down into molasses, and the Port itself reduced into the dark, rich, sweet-savoury sauces that the region's cooks build around its game and its poultry. The emblematic dish is pato no vinho do Porto, duck braised slowly in Port wine with onions, cloves, cinnamon, and bay until the meat falls from the bone and the sauce thickens to a deep mahogany gloss, a dish in which the valley's wine and the valley's table become one and the same expression of a landscape wholly given over to the vine.
Barossa Valley, South Australia, Australia — c. 1842 CE
German Lutheran refugees fleeing religious persecution in Silesia and Prussia arrived in the Barossa Valley of South Australia in the 1840s, bringing with them a tradition of careful viticulture and a deep, settled relationship with the vine. They planted Shiraz, the grape the French call Syrah, in the warm days and cool nights of the valley, conditions that suited it to perfection, and a remarkable thing followed: because Australia escaped the phylloxera louse that ravaged the vineyards of Europe in the 1870s and destroyed almost all the old vines of the continent, some of those original Barossa plantings still stand and still bear fruit, making the valley home to some of the oldest Shiraz vines anywhere on earth. The German settlers carried also their tradition of cooking with wine, the pot roasts, the braises, the long-simmered meats of the Central European kitchen, and this met the abundance of Australian beef and the depth of the Barossa's own wines to produce beef cheeks braised in Shiraz. In this dish the peppery, plummy, full-bodied character of the local wine is poured over a tough and sinewy cut and cooked for hours until the meat turns butter-soft and the sauce concentrates to an intense richness, a preparation as specific to its landscape as the wine that makes it, and a direct inheritance of the Lutheran exiles who first set their vines in the valley floor.
Concord, Massachusetts, USA — c. 1849 CE
In 1849, in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, Ephraim Wales Bull bred a new grape from a wild native vine of the species Vitis labrusca that grew near his home, selecting over years of trial a plant hardy enough to survive the bitter New England winters, sweet-tart enough to eat fresh from the bunch, and so distinctive in flavour that it would come to define the American relationship with the grape. The Concord, as it was named for its birthplace, was no relation of the Old World wine grape but a thing wholly of the New World, and its deep, musky, jammy taste, what Americans call simply 'grapey', became the flavour of a nation's grape juice and jelly. Welch's grape juice, launched in 1869 by a temperance-minded dentist as an unfermented communion wine, depended upon the Concord, as did the peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich that became a fixture of the American childhood. The Concord's most distinctive culinary expression, however, is the grape pie, a regional speciality of the Finger Lakes of New York and of New England, made by the laborious slip-skin technique unique to this kind of grape: the tough skins are popped from the soft flesh by hand, the pulp cooked and sieved to remove the seeds, and the skins then cooked and folded back in, producing a pie of extraordinary deep-purple colour and the intense, musky, jammy flavour that no European wine grape can replicate.
Mendoza, Argentina — c. 1852 CE
The French agronomist and enologist Michel Pouget introduced the Malbec grape to Mendoza in 1853, brought in by an Argentine government that was determined to modernise the country's wine industry and to plant European vines in the high desert at the foot of the Andes. Malbec was a modest grape in its south-western French homeland around Cahors, dark and rustic and seldom celebrated, but at Mendoza's altitude of some 750 metres it underwent a transformation: the intense mountain sun, the sharp cold of the nights, and the pure snowmelt drawn down from the Andes to irrigate the vineyards together produced wines of extraordinary depth and concentration, with their characteristic perfume of violets, ripe plum, and dark chocolate. By the late twentieth century Argentine Malbec had become one of the most recognised wine styles in the world, and Mendoza the most celebrated wine region of the Southern Hemisphere after the Barossa. The Andean wine culture found its great cold-weather dish in short ribs braised in Malbec, the same wine that defines the region's identity poured into the pot to cook the beef long and slow until it is meltingly tender and the sauce is deep and dark, a dish that carries the winemaking family through the cold mountain winter on the strength of the grape that feeds them in every other sense besides.
Napa Valley, California, USA — c. 1976 CE
The Judgement of Paris in 1976, a blind tasting in which a panel of eminent French judges, to their own astonishment, ranked California wines above the grand crus of Bordeaux and Burgundy, announced the Napa Valley to the world as a wine region of the first rank and overturned the old assumption that great wine could come only from Europe. Yet the roots of Napa's grape culture reached back far earlier, to the Italian immigrant winemakers who had cultivated vines in the valley since the 1880s and who brought with them not only their craft but the foodways of the Italian harvest. Amongst these was schiacciata all'uva, the rustic Tuscan grape bread baked at the vendemmia, in which whole wine grapes, skins, seeds, and all, are pressed into a flat, olive-oil-enriched bread dough and baked until the fruit bursts and caramelises and the whole turns jammy, sticky, and faintly winey. At the harvest festivals and winery tables of the Napa Valley this homely flatbread became a signature of the autumn crush, California's own answer to the Tuscan harvest table, the fresh grape returning to the bread of the people even in a valley given over to the most celebrated wines of the New World.
