Israel’s Forgotten Grapes
I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness.
—Hosea 9:10 (KJV)
The Israeli city of Ariel sits in the heart of the Palestinian West Bank, which makes it a political flash point. News stories often refer to it as a settlement, so part of me expected some tiny little outpost. Instead I found a rapidly growing university and community of twenty thousand people. Shivi Drori is one of them. He’s a scientist and winemaker doing research on indigenous grapes.
When I first read about Drori’s work it seemed like a modest effort. The Ariel winery fits inside a metal shipping container, with test batches fermenting in metal kegs. But the clean, well-equipped lab was filled with diligent young scientists. I revised my opinion—this was a serious project.
I told Drori that I’d visited Cremisan the day before. “Nice,” he said in a tone both businesslike and enthusiastic. He’s like that, a crack scientist and former paratrooper, friendly but sure of himself. I asked how he got interested in native grapes, given that nobody in the modern Israeli wine business used them. Cremisan—located in the Palestinian West Bank—was the only such winery. The biblical stories of vast ancient vineyards had intrigued Drori, even though many people insisted the local grapes of the present were fit only for eating or for juice.
“This is a very old dream of mine. I’m a winemaker, eleven, twelve years. And from the start I thought about doing let’s say, special things. Not just the Cabernet, Merlot, whatever.”
I started to ask a question. Drori gently but firmly asked me to wait until he finished the background story. Starting in 2011, with funding from the Jewish National Fund, Drori’s team analyzed all the local grapes that had names, even the table grapes. “And we found out a few of them could actually be used for wine production. The whites are very interesting,” he said.
Drori’s team did DNA analysis on the grapes, cataloged archaeological sites with grape remains, analyzed sugar content and acidity (key benchmarks for wine), created sample micro-vintages, and did rigorous taste tests to identify the flavor profile of each variety.
Such comprehensive research into the origins of obscure grapes rarely happens. Most grape science around the world focuses on improving or increasing production, or controlling diseases and pests. In other words, things that help wineries make money.
The project also did historical research on grape names, and catalogued leaf structure and grape seed shapes. “We have some nice findings about the historic origins of the Jandali and Hamdani dating to the fourth century. They were called Godali and Haldali,” he said. Drori’s research shows that there’s evidence they were used to make wine for centuries. In about 1600 Rabbi Menahem de Lonzano wrote that “up to this day there are two sorts of wine in Jerusalem: Jandali and Hamdani wines,” and likened their tastes to different women’s personalities.
Drori’s team identified nineteen local varieties with wine grape qualities. The project expanded into a nationwide search for wild grapes, with populations pinpointed by GPS. “Meaning we are walking all through Israel, from the north to the south, collecting every vine we can put our hands on. Out of these, we have today an additional one hundred varieties we found that are unique to Israel,” he said.
He showed me some papers and slides on his laptop, and explained that DNA analysis found some links between the Holy Land grapes and those in the Caucasus. That could represent a branch of the grape family tree, which grew as winemaking spread out of the mountains and down into the Holy Land. Drori said he was collaborating with other scientists on more research.
I mentioned that I’d be visiting the Caucasus, where most experts believe wine grapes were first domesticated. “It’s a theory which I hope to demolish soon,” Drori said dismissively. “We believe that Israel was a wine domestication point.” That’s a common dream among grape scientists. Everybody wants their country to be first. Scientists in a half-dozen countries have tried to disprove the Caucasus origins theory, with no real success. New evidence is always possible, however, and the goal isn’t so far-fetched. In 1997 German researchers did the same thing for einkorn wheat by comparing the DNA from scores of wild and domesticated strains. They traced all modern domestic einkorn to a single wild population in southeastern Turkey. Drori was trying to find a grapevine version of that.
He had some practical insights, too: “I believe that Israel will finally understand that it is a hot region. Here winemakers can either fight the sun and try to produce European wines, or go with the sun.” In other words, they could keep planting cool-climate European grapes, or use native grapes that evolved for a Mediterranean climate. Drori also thinks Cremisan’s current efforts, and even the tests from another Israeli winery, are misguided. They use native varieties but only to produce European style wines. “That doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Drori said.
We left the lab and went over to the basement of another building, where precious samples of grape seeds found at archaeological sites are kept. A young woman in a white lab coat opened a cabinet, pulled out a small oblong box, and tipped a single dark black seed into her gloved hand. The seeds were from the era of King David. The thought that someone had picked those grapes about three thousand years ago sent a chill up my spine. With more work—and some luck—Drori hopes to match the DNA of an ancient grape seed to an existing native variety.
“At the end of this year, we will have some notion about which grapes were used for wine production here in ancient times. We have remains from the Temple Mount, and we have them from Ashkelon, from the north, all over Israel,” he said. An Israeli winery is working on a Hamdani and Jandali blend, too, so it looks like Cremisan will soon have competition.
The visits to Cremisan and Drori exceeded my expectations, and confounded them. Clearly the Oxford Companion was wrong to state that Israel had no native wine grapes. I’d worshipped the memory of a Cremisan red wine, but now I liked their whites best. And I saw Drori’s point: the Cremisan wines were made in a European style, aged in oak or stainless steel. I was back to wondering what ancient wine really tasted like.
Vouillamoz and Drori are first-rate scientists, but with a mix of emotions and new questions I sought out viticulture second opinions, and called Sean Myles, the lead author on a widely cited 2011 paper on grape biodiversity published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a top journal. He has a Masters of Science degree from Oxford University and a PhD in genetics from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. A native of Canada, Myles now teaches at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. First I asked if there was any justification for planting just a few grape varieties all over the world. He reeled off a botanical sermon about rampant viticultural apartheid.
“If applied to any other category you’d say this is just plain old racism. A little bit of wild ancestry? Ah, you’re still a hybrid. You’re inferior to the noble European grapes,” Myles said, and then provided an example of the industry mind-set. He had met with leaders of a large American wine company, which sells billions of dollars worth of wine per year. Sitting around a table with the heads of the company, Myles remarked that about twenty grape varieties take up virtually the entire world wine market. One of the executives replied that the number was actually six. Myles eventually shifted his research priorities from grapes to apples because resistance to change in the wine industry was so great. He and his wife recently opened a cider bar in Nova Scotia.
I called Andy Walker, the Louis P. Martini Endowed Chair in Viticulture at the University of California, Davis, one of the best schools in the world for wine grape research. He was mild-mannered but equally firm. “We’re still caught in that trap of saying, well, there are only ten good varieties in the whole world, and that’s it. Anyone who’s drunk wine around the world realizes this is a complete fallacy,” Walker told me. “There are wonderful wines to be made everywhere from a huge number of varieties. But it’s a marketing scam that we ended up with ten varieties that are [supposedly] destined to be the best in the world.” All good wine grapes match a particular environmental niche, Walker said.
Independently of one another, some of the best grape scientists in the world agree that there is no reason to make wine from only a few varieties of grapes. As UC Davis scientist Carole Meredith observed about wine after she left academia, “Can there be any other business where there’s so much bullshit?” It all made me think. Even beginning gardeners know that orange trees don’t do well in Vermont and apples don’t thrive in south Florida. Yet thousands of vineyards around the world have rammed the famous French varieties into an equally unsuitable range of habitats. With no disrespect to the best winemakers, the idea that a few French varieties are “noble” has plenty of flaws. The earliest mention of the term in relation to grapes is in the Bible: “Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me?” (Jeremiah 2:21, KJV) and other passages suggest particular valleys had especially choice purplish grapes. In the seventeenth century Shakespeare uses the term in All’s Well That Ends Well as a pun, when the old nobleman Lafew tells the king, “Oh, will you eat no grapes, my royal fox? Yes, but you will, my noble grapes.”
The French eventually used “noble” to refer to six grape varieties (Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Riesling, and Sauvignon Blanc) and some others were deemed “common.” It all had about as much factual basis as the idea that kings and queens were better than other mortals, or the mistaken belief once common among winemakers that a red grape couldn’t produce white offspring. Over time wine lovers (and wine sellers) simply became attached to the idea of noble grapes.
Given all the centuries of hype, I wanted one more scientific perspective about grapes, even after talking to Myles and Walker. Whether you’re writing about finches, tortoises, earthworms, or any other creature, it always makes sense to see what Charles Darwin had to say on the subject. It turns out that he was fascinated by grapes, too. Though grapevines are often presented to wine lovers as a kind of viticultural pinup—the fruit arranged in perfect, bountiful rows—the great British scientist found a curiously complex plant.
To better understand its origins, Darwin placed a bell glass over a young Muscat grape in a hothouse and watched the shoot move every day. The plant was fidgety, and he found that odd. “Had it not made at least three revolutions whilst the sky was uniformly overcast, I should have attributed this slight degree of movement to the varying action of the light,” Darwin wrote in an essay titled “On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants.” He continued, “It has often been vaguely asserted that plants are distinguished from animals by not having the power of movement. It should rather be said that plants acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them . . .”
Grapes are lianas, a category of tree-climbing vines. Kudzu and rattan—both of which can grow hundreds of feet long—are lianas, too, and suggest how grapevines might behave if left to their own devices. Their ancient relatives were able to climb tremendous heights, reaching the places with the most sunlight, but as Darwin wrote, they didn’t have to spend very much energy doing so: “Plants become climbers, in order, it may be presumed, to reach the light, and to expose a large surface of their leaves to its action and to that of the free air. This is effected by climbers with wonderfully little expenditure of organized matter, in comparison with trees, which have to support a load of heavy branches by a massive trunk.”
Grapes use their wispy tendrils almost like rock climbers use their hands. “The tendril strikes some object, and quickly curls round and firmly grasps it. In the course of some hours it contracts into a spire, dragging up the stem, and forming an excellent spring. All movements now cease. By growth the tissues soon become wonderfully strong and durable. The tendril has done its work, and has done it in an admirable manner,” Darwin explained, and thus the vine is able to “easily pass from branch to branch, and securely ramble over a wide, sun-lit surface.”
Some botanists even compare lianas to a parasite, since they compete with tree leaves for the sun while their roots also take water from below. In grapes this results in more energy to produce large bunches of fruit, which attract birds and other small creatures, who subsequently spread the seeds. As if all that isn’t enough, tendrils can evolve into either a climbing tool or flowers and grapes. Darwin remarked that even the boldest believer in evolution “would never have surmised that the same individual plant, at the same period of growth, would have yielded every possible gradation between ordinary flower-stalks for the support of the flowers and fruit, and tendrils used exclusively for climbing. But the vine clearly gives us such a case.” In other words, various limbs on the same plant multitask in different ways. That might not seem like a big deal, but consider the human parallel: hands that could grasp tools or be a reproductive organ. Darwin’s essay included two drawings to illustrate the point. The one on the left shows tendrils B and C growing from the grape stalk. In the illustration on the right tendril C bursts into flowers, while B attaches to another branch to help support others heavy with grapes. Amazing.
To Darwin, the multitasking tendrils told a profound story of grape evolution because they illustrate a moment of transition between primitive plants and later, more complex varieties. The earliest plants didn’t even have flowers or seeds—think lichen and moss. Fast-forward more than a hundred million years and there are flowers and seeds everywhere.
So how did grapes become so adaptable? Dodging mass extinctions may be part of the answer. The earliest lianas survived the K–T mass extinction event of approximately sixty-six million years ago, which helped kill off large dinosaurs as well as many plants and sea creatures. A massive asteroid traveling at more than forty-four-thousand miles per hour hit the Yucatán Peninsula, creating a crater that’s estimated to have been about one hundred miles wide. The impact was at least a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and it triggered tsunamis, megastorms, and a worldwide cloud of ash and debris. That was only part of the bad weather news of the K–T extinction era.
Before, during, and after the blast an enormous group of volcanoes in India were erupting, spewing toxic sulphur into the atmosphere. Many scientists believe the volcano and asteroid combination was a one-two extinction punch, on land and in the seas. But the early grapes survived it all, perhaps aided by the duplicate set of DNA they possess. If a portion of the genome gets damaged, there’s a backup, like a spare tire. The post-asteroid world was also filled with smaller mammals and birds—the perfect creatures to spread seeds.
Fast-forward to our modern vineyards. We prune and train vines so that they grow only a few feet tall, and we provide stakes or a trellis to hold them up. We eliminate other plants or trees that would compete for water or sun. The result? A plant that evolved to survive global extinctions and grow dozens of feet high now devotes all of its energy to just two things: putting down deep roots (thus guaranteeing a steady supply of nutrients and water), and producing tasty fruit. By removing all other distractions from the lives of modern wine grapes, we turned them into prodigious flavor factories. The wild grapevine was an absolute free spirit, able to grow this way and that, spread its seeds far and wide, and have sex with other vines it rambled across. We’ve short-circuited all that.
For thousands of years cultures have devoted enormous amounts of energy to grape health and well-being. Just like our ancestors before us, we carry them to new fields, fertilize and water the vines, and compose worshipful poems and prose about them. So it seems fair to ask whether grapes are our masters, and not the other way around.