A grape is a fruit, botanically a
berry, of the deciduous woody
vines of the flowering plant genus ''
Vitis''. Grapes are a non-
climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters.
The cultivation of grapes began perhaps 8,000 years ago, and the fruit has been used as human food over history. Eaten fresh or in dried form (as
raisins,
currants and
sultanas), grapes also hold cultural significance in many parts of the world, particularly for their role in
winemaking. Other grape-derived products include various types of jam, juice, vinegar and oil.
History
The
Middle East
The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabian Peninsula, Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Anatolia, Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Pro ...
is generally described as the homeland of grape and the cultivation of this plant began there 6,000–8,000 years ago.
Yeast, one of the earliest domesticated
microorganisms, occurs naturally on the skins of grapes, leading to the discovery of alcoholic drinks such as wine. The earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of wine-making in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in
Georgia.
The
oldest known winery was found in
Armenia, dating to around 4000 BC. By the 9th century AD, the city of
Shiraz was known to produce some of the finest wines in the Middle East. Thus it has been proposed that
Syrah red wine is named after
Shiraz, a city in Persia where the grape was used to make
Shirazi wine
Shiraz wine refers to two different wines. Historically, the name refers to the wine produced around the city of Shiraz in present-day Iran.Entry on ''"Persia"'' in J. Robinson (ed), ''"The Oxford Companion to Wine"'', Third Edition, p. 512-513, ...
.
[Hugh Johnson, ''"The Story of Wine"'', New Illustrated Edition, p. 58 & p. 131, Mitchell Beazley 2004, ]
Ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1 ...
record the cultivation of purple grapes, and history attests to the ancient
Greeks,
Cypriots,
Phoenicians, and
Romans growing purple grapes both for eating and wine production. The growing of grapes would later spread to other regions in Europe, as well as North Africa, and eventually in
North America.
In 2005 a team of archaeologists concluded that some
Chalcolithic wine jars, which were discovered in Cyprus in the 1930s, were the oldest of their kind in the world, dating back to 3,500 BC. Moreover, Commandaria, a sweet dessert wine from Cyprus, is the oldest manufactured wine in the world, its origins traced as far back as 2000 BC.
In North America, native grapes belonging to various species of the genus ''Vitis'' proliferate in the wild across the continent, and were a part of the diet of many
Native Americans, but were considered by early European colonists to be unsuitable for wine. In the 19th century,
Ephraim Bull of
Concord, Massachusetts, cultivated seeds from wild ''
Vitis labrusca'' vines to create the
Concord grape
The Concord grape is a cultivar derived from the grape species ''Vitis labrusca'' (also known as fox grape) that are used as table grapes, wine grapes and juice grapes. They are often used to make grape jelly, grape juice, grape pies, grape- ...
which would become an important agricultural crop in the United States.
[Jancis Robinson, ''Vines, Grapes & Wines'' (Mitchell Beazley, 1986, ), pp 8, 18, 228.]
Description
Grapes are a type of
fruit that grow in clusters of 15 to 300, and can be crimson, black, dark blue, yellow, green, orange, and pink. "White" grapes are actually green in color, and are evolutionarily derived from the purple grape.
Mutations in two
regulatory genes of white grapes turn off production of
anthocyanins, which are responsible for the color of purple grapes. Anthocyanins and other
pigment chemicals of the larger family of
polyphenols in purple grapes are responsible for the varying shades of purple in red wines. Grapes are typically an ellipsoid shape resembling a
prolate spheroid.
Nutrition
Raw grapes are 81% water, 18%
carbohydrates, 1%
protein
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, res ...
, and have negligible
fat (table). A reference amount of raw grapes supplies of
food energy and a moderate amount of
vitamin K (14% of the
Daily Value), with no other
micronutrients in significant content.
Grapevines
Most domesticated grapes come from
cultivars of ''
Vitis vinifera'', a grapevine native to the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Minor amounts of fruit and wine come from American and Asian species such as:
* ''
Vitis amurensis'', the most important Asian species
* ''
Vitis labrusca'', the North American table and grape juice grapevines (including the
Concord
Concord may refer to:
Meaning "agreement"
* Pact or treaty, frequently between nations (indicating a condition of harmony)
* Harmony, in music
* Agreement (linguistics), a change in the form of a word depending on grammatical features of other ...
cultivar), sometimes used for wine, are native to the Eastern United States and Canada.
* ''
Vitis mustangensis
''Vitis mustangensis'', commonly known as the mustang grape, is a species of grape that is native to the southern United States. Its range includes parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma
Oklahoma (; Choctaw: ; ch ...
'' (the mustang grape), found in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma
* ''
Vitis riparia'', a wild vine of North America, is sometimes used for winemaking and for jam. It is native to the entire Eastern United States and north to
Quebec.
* ''
Vitis rotundifolia'' (the muscadine), used for jams and wine, is native to the Southeastern United States from
Delaware
Delaware ( ) is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Maryland to its south and west; Pennsylvania to its north; and New Jersey and the Atlantic Ocean to its east. The state takes its name from the adjacent ...
to the
Gulf of Mexico.
Trade
Distribution and production
According to the
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 75,866 square kilometers of the world are dedicated to grapes. Approximately 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, and 2% as
dried fruit. A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be reconstituted for fruits canned "with no
added sugar" and "100% natural". The area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year.
There are no reliable statistics that break down grape production by variety. It is believed that the most widely planted variety is
Sultana, also known as Thompson Seedless, with at least 3,600 km
2 (880,000 acres) dedicated to it. The second most common variety is
Airén. Other popular varieties include
Cabernet Sauvignon,
Sauvignon blanc,
Cabernet Franc,
Merlot,
Grenache,
Tempranillo
Tempranillo (also known as Ull de Llebre, Cencibel, Tinto Fino and Tinta del Pais in Spain, Aragonez or Tinta Roriz in Portugal, and several other synonyms elsewhere) is a black grape variety widely grown to make full-bodied red wines in its ...
,
Riesling, and
Chardonnay.
Table and wine grapes
Commercially cultivated grapes can usually be classified as either
table or wine grapes, based on their intended method of consumption: eaten raw (table grapes) or used to make
wine (wine grapes). While almost all of them belong to the same species, ''
Vitis vinifera'', table and wine grapes have significant differences, brought about through
selective breeding. Table grape cultivars tend to have large, seedless fruit (see below) with relatively thin skin. Wine grapes are smaller, usually seeded, and have relatively thick skins (a desirable characteristic in winemaking, since much of the aroma in wine comes from the skin). Wine grapes also tend to be very sweet: they are harvested at the time when their juice is approximately 24% sugar by weight. By comparison, commercially produced "100% grape juice", made from table grapes, is usually around 15% sugar by weight.
Seedless grapes
Seedless cultivars now make up the overwhelming majority of table grape plantings. Because grapevines are
vegetatively propagated
Vegetative reproduction (also known as vegetative propagation, vegetative multiplication or cloning) is any form of asexual reproduction occurring in plants in which a new plant grows from a fragment or cutting of the parent plant or speci ...
by cuttings, the lack of seeds does not present a problem for reproduction. It is an issue for breeders, who must either use a seeded variety as the female parent or rescue embryos early in development using
tissue culture techniques.
There are several sources of the seedlessness trait, and essentially all commercial cultivators get it from one of three sources:
Thompson Seedless,
Russian Seedless
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
* Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and p ...
, and
Black Monukka, all being cultivars of ''
Vitis vinifera''. There are currently more than a dozen varieties of seedless grapes. Several, such as Einset Seedless, Benjamin Gunnels's Prime seedless grapes, Reliance, and Venus, have been specifically cultivated for hardiness and quality in the relatively cold climates of northeastern United States and southern
Ontario.
An offset to the improved eating quality of seedlessness is the loss of potential health benefits provided by the enriched
phytochemical content of grape seeds (see
Health claims, below).
Raisins, currants and sultanas
In most of Europe and North America, dried grapes are referred to as "raisins" or the local equivalent. In the UK, three different varieties are recognized, forcing the EU to use the term "dried vine fruit" in official documents.
A ''
raisin'' is any dried grape. While ''raisin'' is a French
loanword, the word in French refers to the fresh fruit; ''grappe'' (from which the English ''grape'' is derived) refers to the bunch (as in ''une grappe de raisins''). A raisin in French is called ''raisin sec'' ("dry grape").
A ''
currant'' is a dried
Zante Black Corinth grape, the name being a corruption of the French ''raisin de Corinthe'' (
Corinth grape). The names of the black and red currant, now more usually
blackcurrant
The blackcurrant (''Ribes nigrum''), also known as black currant or cassis, is a deciduous shrub in the family Grossulariaceae grown for its edible berries. It is native to temperate parts of central and northern Europe and northern Asia, whe ...
and
redcurrant
The redcurrant or red currant (''Ribes rubrum'') is a member of the genus '' Ribes'' in the gooseberry family. It is native to western Europe. The species is widely cultivated and has escaped into the wild in many regions.
Description
''Ribe ...
, two berries unrelated to grapes, are derived from this use. Some other fruits of similar appearance are also so named, for example, Australian currant, native currant, Indian currant.
A ''sultana'' was originally a raisin made from
Sultana grapes of Turkish origin (known as Thompson Seedless in the United States), but the word is now applied to raisins made from either white grapes or red grapes that are bleached to resemble the traditional sultana.
Juice
Grape juice is obtained from crushing and blending grapes into a liquid. The juice is often sold in stores or
fermented and made into
wine,
brandy, or
vinegar. Grape juice that has been pasteurized, removing any naturally occurring yeast, will not ferment if kept sterile, and thus contains no alcohol. In the
wine industry, grape juice that contains 7–23% of pulp, skins, stems and seeds is often referred to as "
must". In North America, the most common grape juice is purple and made from
Concord grapes
The Concord grape is a cultivar derived from the grape species ''Vitis labrusca'' (also known as fox grape) that are used as table grapes, wine grapes and juice grapes. They are often used to make grape jelly, grape juice, grape pies, grape-f ...
, while white grape juice is commonly made from
Niagara grapes, both of which are varieties of grapes, a different species from European wine grapes. In California, Sultana (known there as Thompson Seedless) grapes are sometimes diverted from the raisin or table market to produce white juice.
Pomace and phytochemicals
Winemaking from red and white grape flesh and skins produces substantial quantities of organic residues, collectively called
pomace (also "marc"), which includes crushed skins, seeds, stems, and leaves generally used as
compost.
Grape pomace – some 10-30% of the total mass of grapes crushed – contains various
phytochemicals, such as unfermented sugars, alcohol,
polyphenols,
tannins,
anthocyanins, and numerous other compounds, some of which are harvested and
extracted for commercial applications (a process sometimes called "valorization" of the pomace).
Skin
Anthocyanins tend to be the main polyphenolics in purple grapes, whereas flavan-3-ols (i.e. catechins) are the more abundant class of polyphenols in white varieties. Total phenolic content is higher in purple varieties due almost entirely to anthocyanin density in purple grape skin compared to absence of anthocyanins in white grape skin. Phenolic content of grape skin varies with cultivar, soil composition, climate, geographic origin, and cultivation practices or exposure to diseases, such as fungal infections.
Muscadine grapes contain a relatively high phenolic content among dark grapes. In muscadine skins, ellagic acid, myricetin
Myricetin is a member of the flavonoid class of polyphenolic compounds, with antioxidant properties. Common dietary sources include vegetables (including tomatoes), fruits (including oranges), nuts, berries, tea, and red wine. Myricetin is struc ...
, quercetin, kaempferol, and trans-resveratrol are major phenolics.
The flavonols syringetin
Syringetin is an ''O''-methylated flavonol, a type of flavonoid. It is found in red grape (absent in white grape), in ''Lysimachia congestiflora'' and in '' Vaccinium uliginosum'' (bog billberries). It is one of the phenolic compounds present in ...
, syringetin 3-O-galactoside, laricitrin
Laricitrin is an ''O''-methylated flavonol, a type of flavonoid. It is found in red grape (absent in white grape) and in '' Vaccinium uliginosum'' (bog billberries). It is one of the phenolic compounds present in wine.
Metabolism
Laricitrin is ...
and laricitrin 3-O-galactoside are also found in purple grape but absent in white grape.
Seeds
Muscadine grape seeds contain about twice the total polyphenol content of skins.[ Grape seed oil from crushed seeds is used in cosmeceuticals and skincare products. Grape seed oil, including tocopherols ( vitamin E) and high contents of ]phytosterol
Phytosterols are phytosteroids, similar to cholesterol, that serve as structural components of biological membranes of plants. They encompass plant sterols and stanols. More than 250 sterols and related compounds have been identified. Free phyt ...
s and polyunsaturated fatty acids such as linoleic acid, oleic acid, and alpha-linolenic acid.
Resveratrol
Resveratrol, a stilbene compound, is found in widely varying amounts among grape varieties, primarily in their skins and seeds. Muscadine grapes have about one hundred times higher concentration of stilbenes than pulp. Fresh grape skin contains about 50 to 100 micrograms of resveratrol per gram.
Health claims
French paradox
Comparing diets among Western countries, researchers have discovered that although French people tend to eat higher levels of animal fat, the incidence of heart disease remains low in France. This phenomenon has been termed the French paradox
The French paradox is an apparently paradoxical epidemiological observation that French people have a relatively low incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), while having a diet relatively rich in saturated fats, in apparent contradicti ...
, and is thought to occur from protective benefits of regularly consuming red wine, among other dietary practices. Alcohol consumption in moderation may be cardioprotective by its minor anticoagulant effect and vasodilation.
Although adoption of wine consumption is generally not recommended by health authorities, some research indicates moderate consumption, such as one glass of red wine a day for women and two for men, may confer health benefits. Alcohol itself may have protective effects on the cardiovascular system.
Grape and raisin toxicity in dogs
The consumption of grapes and raisins presents a potential health threat to dogs. Their toxicity to dogs can cause the animal to develop acute kidney failure (the sudden development of kidney failure) with anuria (a lack of urine production) and may be fatal.
In religion
Christians have traditionally used wine during worship services as a means of remembering the blood of Jesus Christ which was shed for the remission of sins. Christians who oppose the partaking of alcoholic beverages sometimes use grape juice as the "cup" or "wine" in the Lord's Supper
The Eucharist (; from Greek , , ), also known as Holy Communion and the Lord's Supper, is a Christian rite that is considered a sacrament in most churches, and as an ordinance in others. According to the New Testament, the rite was institut ...
.
The Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
continues to use wine in the celebration of the Eucharist because it is part of the tradition passed down through the ages starting with Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, where Catholics believe the consecrated bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, a dogma known as transubstantiation. Wine is used (not grape juice) both due to its strong Scriptural roots, and also to follow the tradition set by the early Christian Church. The Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church (1983), Canon 924 says that the wine used must be natural, made from grapes of the vine, and not corrupt.
Gallery
File:GrapesBuds.JPG, Flower buds
File:GrapesFlowers.JPG, Flowers
File:TenderGrapes.JPG, Immature fruit
File:Grapes Angoor.JPG, Grapes in Iran
File:Grapes.jpg, Wine grapes
File:Cyprusgrapefarm.jpg, Vineyard in the Troodos Mountains
Troodos (sometimes spelled Troödos; el, Τρόοδος ; tr, Trodos Dağları) is the largest mountain range in Cyprus, located in roughly the center of the island. Its highest peak is Mount Olympus ( el, Όλυμπος), also known as Ch ...
File:Seedless grapes of Kallidaikurichi.jpg, seedless grapes
File:Grapes in the Philippines 1.jpg, Grapes in the La Union, Philippines
See also
* Annual growth cycle of grapevines
* Drakshasava Drakshasava (Sanskrit: द्राक्षासव) is a traditional Ayurvedic tonic made from grapes. Drakshasava is a weak wine because the grape juice is usually only partially fermented. It is also sometimes prepared by using raisin concentr ...
, a traditional Ayurvedic tonic made from grapes
* Grape syrup
* List of grape dishes
* List of grape varieties
* '' Menispermum canadense'', a poisonous species resembling wild grapes
* Propagation of grapevines
The propagation of grapevines is an important consideration in commercial viticulture and winemaking. Grapevines, most of which belong to the ''Vitis vinifera'' family, produce one crop of fruit each growing season with a limited life span for ind ...
* The Fox and the Grapes
The Fox and the Grapes is one of Aesop's fables, numbered 15 in the Perry Index. The narration is concise and subsequent retellings have often been equally so. The story concerns a fox that tries to eat grapes from a vine but cannot reach them ...
References
Further reading
* Creasy, G. L. and L. L. Creasy (2009). ''Grapes'' (Crop Production Science in Horticulture). CABI. .
External links
*
*
{{Authority control
Berries
Crops originating from Europe
Edible fruits
Plants in the Bible
Flora of Palestine (region)
Flora of Israel