Ancient wines tasted a lot like modern ones

SINCE ITS domestication more than 6,000 years ago, the grapevine has become one of the world’s most valuable crops. Although grapevines produce a great many foods including table grapes, raisins, preserves and cooked leaves, archaeological evidence makes it clear that wine came very early on. Yet it has remained mysterious whether the grapes crushed to make wine long ago were at all similar to those that are crushed in wineries today. New work led by Jazmín Ramos-Madrigal at the University of Copenhagen and Nathan Wales at the University of York published this week in reveals that the differences were exceptionally small and that, in some cases, the grapes were identical.Like many flowering plants, grapevines can reproduce asexually. This means that instead of depending upon a male plant fertilising a female plant through pollen transfer whereby the genes of the two plants are mixed together, grapevines can effectively be cloned. This is done using techniques like planting the shoots of a healthy vine in soil or grafting one vine onto another. This has made it possible for vineyards to grow grapes with identical genes year after year and thus produce wines from different years that are very similar in flavour. What has remained unclear until now is the length of time that specific grapevines have been cloned in such a manner.