A 600-year-old grape seed discovered in the toilets of a medieval French hospital is genetically identical to the grapes still being used to make pinot noir wine, researchers have found.
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The seed reveals that people in France have been cultivating the immensely popular variety of grape since at least the 1400s, scientists said in a new study published in the journal Nature Communications.
It was found in a toilet in a 15th-century hospital in Valenciennes in northern France. At the time, toilets were sometimes used as rubbish bins, the researchers explained.
Pinot noir, which is often associated with France’s Burgundy region, is the fourth most widely grown grape in the world.
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The study involved sequencing the genome of 54 grape seeds dating from the Bronze Age – from around 2300 BC – to the Middle Ages.
It is not possible to say whether the fruit was “eaten like table grapes or whether people made wine from it at the time”, explained study co-author Laurent Bouby, of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier.
However, it confirms that generations of winegrowers had been using what are today called “clonal propagation” techniques, such as preserving cuttings of particular grape varieties for 600 years.
Ancient texts had offered indications this was happening, “but outside of paleogenomics, it is very difficult to characterise this technique”, said Bouby
But the new research found evidence this technique was being used in many areas as far back as the Iron Age, around 625-500 BC.
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The oldest grapes analysed in the study were from wild vines in the French region of Nimes dated to around 2,000 BC.
Domesticated vines then started to appear between 625 and 500BC in France’s southern Var region.
This lines up with the time colonising Greeks were believed to have introduced viticulture – the cultivation of grapevines – to France, after founding the city of Marseille.
Another of the study’s co-authors, Ludovic Orlando, said it was already known that wine was traded at the time by the Greeks and the Etruscans, because of wine jugs called amphorae which endured through the centuries.
The DNA of the grape seeds, particularly those from the ancient Roman period, revealed long-distance exchanges of domesticated grape varieties from places including Spain, the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East.
It also showed there was plenty of genetic mixing of domesticated grape varieties and local wild vines during the Roman period, particularly in northern France.
(with AFP)
