Table grapes are the berries of vines in the Vitis genus. They can be a wide range of colors including black, purple, red, amber, green, and pale. The berries grow in clusters.
Grapevines like to grow around rivers in deciduous forests or along the banks of flowing water.
Grapes are a berry. A berry is a fleshy fruit without a pit produced from one ovary on one flower. That makes a lot of things berries, like cucumbers, currants, eggplants, and tomatoes but actually excludes things like strawberries.
Grape plants are vines. Which are any plant that has a trailing or climbing growth habit. It can also refer to a part of a plant that does that. Vines can crossover from vine form to shrub. Vines “like” to have something to grow onto. In the wild that may be a tree or natural surface and in cultivation that can be a trellis or a building. If a vine doesn’t have something to grow onto (called a “support”), it can creep along the ground or stiffen up some to be a sort of low-laying shrub. The prototypical botanical vines are based on those in the grape family.
There can be over 100 grapes to a bunch. If left alone a vine can spread more than 50 feet.
Fossils of prehistoric grapes go back into the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago. Species of grapes are spread widely across the northern hemisphere. There are wild grapes in both Eurasia and North America because the grape family existed before the continents separated 60 million years ago.
The human history of grapes revolves around winemaking, rather than consumption of grapes fresh.
Wild grapes would have been food for hunter gatherers. The first domestication of grapes occurred 7000-4000 BC somewhere between the Black Sea and Iran. The country of Georgia is thought to be where grapes were first domesticated for wine. Domesticated grapes may have spread out from Georgia, or the idea of domesticating grapes did causing other natural varieties to be domesticated in other parts of Asia and Europe.
Meanwhile in North America, indigenous peoples were husbanding their native grape varieties. Evidence for grape consumption in North America goes back 10000 years, particularly in the Mississippi delta and upper Mid West. In addition to having agriculture in the formal-ish way it was implemented in Eurasia, Native Americans also used sylviculture to cultivate natural plants as crops in the forest. Grapes were an important crop for many native americans and were likely the subject of sylviculture. This was so prevalent that when Vikings landed in New Foundland around 1000 AD, they called it “Vinland” because of all the grapevines.
During the exchange of grapevines between the Old and New worlds a massive ecological disaster happened. An insect pest called phylloxera is native to the Americas where it fed on the grapevines there. American vines had grown resistance to the pest but Eurasian vines had not. When phylloxera reached Europe it destroyed the majority of Old World grape vines. In order to save the varieties, European vines needed to be grafted on to phylloxera-resistant rootstocks from American vines. Many of these rootstocks were the ones husbanded by Native Americans for millenia.
Resveratrol – is a polyphenol that acts like an antioxidant in that it can protect the body from damage. It is found in the skin of red grapes. It seems to be a nebulously, all-around healthy thing that combats inflammation, aging, and diseases that spring from those processes. Not tons is known about it but it has potential and may be worth a mention.
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