Where and when was the vine domesticated? Though mythical, this event seemed to have vanished in the mists of time. Many references, especially textual ones, pointed to the Caucasus (modern day Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) and the surrounding areas. According to the Bible, after the Flood Noah would have planted his first vines on Mount Ararat in eastern Anatolia. And in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old story, the king of Uruk is said to have met the “winewoman” (responsible for making and selling the precious drink) at Dilmun in what is now the Persian Gulf. The word “wine” derives from terms forged in Anatolia and the Caucasus, leading to the Indo-European root *wVn, then to the Greek terms οίνός and the Latin vinum.
The scientists, for their part, remained divided. For some there was only one domestication event in the Caucasus. For the others it would have been two, the second in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of agriculture (a region of the Middle East stretching from the Dead Sea to the Persian Gulf). The time of this domestication also remained in the dark. It is around 8,000 years old, according to two studies published in 2017 and 2018.
Once again, DNA has spoken. And the story engraved in this long volume, as told to us by researchers in Science March 3, challenges those notions. An international team has decoded the genomes of around 1,600 cultivars (grape varieties) and 840 wild varieties (Lambrusques) of the vine from 16 countries around the world. By the way, a curiosity: the vine genome, about 6 times shorter than the human genome, has more genes: about 30,000 for the vine, compared to 20,000 for our species.
“Never Seen”
Thanks to this decoding, the researchers followed the adventure of domesticating Vitis vinifera. How ? By mapping the similarities and differences in the genome of these native and wild strains. “Nearly 1,000 analyzed varieties came from two French INRAE collections [Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement], one in Bordeaux, the other in Montpellier, which houses the Domaine de Vassal collection, the richest in the world,” says Thierry Lacombe, professor at the Institut Agro Montpellier, co-author of the study. Other analyzed varieties, for example from old vineyards in Armenia, had never been clearly identified.
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