Post by Сергей Шепф

Ampelography's Sherlock Holmes Tells How Humans Domesticated Grapes Swiss botanist and grape geneticist Jose Vuillamo told The Wine Podcast that the domestication of wild grapes could have started with germophrodite plants. Dr. Jose Vuillamo is a Swiss ampelographer and one of the world's leading experts on the origin of grape varieties. He is often referred to as the detective of the grape DNA. He gained worldwide fame thanks to his collaboration with British wine critic Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding on the creation of the encyclopedia "Wine Grapes". Wuyamo told how in 2003, together with other botanists, he went to the mountainous regions of the Middle East, to the sources of the Tigris River, where the wild vine Vitis sylvestris ("Forest grapes") grows. There they discovered a rare plant whose flowers had both female (pistils) and male (stamens) reproductive organs. The importance of the discovery lies in the fact that up to this point, only 100% male and 100% female plants had been observed in the wild population of Vitis sylvestris. The researcher formulated a homogamous hypothesis: in the Stone Age, people picking berries might accidentally notice that berries appeared on one vine (a hermaphrodite plant), while other vines did not."If you take a male vine, you will never have berries. If you take a female one, but there is no male one nearby, there will also be no berries. And if you take a hermaphrodite vine, the berries appear, and most likely you will want to preserve this plant," the researcher explained. As Wuyamo explained, the selection of germophrodite plants for reproduction could be the first step towards the domestication of grapes. However, this event could have occurred in different regions of the world independently of each other. Humans have domesticated grapes solely for the sake of alcohol, the ampelographer claims. "The original goal was to get alcohol. Later, when people started using grapes for different purposes, they gradually selected varieties that were less acidic, sweeter, with large clusters and large berries," he said, noting that the very first domestication occurred in southeastern Anatolia (Turkey), near Kurdistan. Are you facing a decline in wine sales in your region due to growing competition? You have a choice: continue to act according to the usual scenario — just wait for customers, attend exhibitions and hope for a new result by performing the usual actions — or sign an agreement with our company ES GROUP and get easy access to the Russian market, trusted and solvent customers, stable profits and reliable partners. The choice is yours!