The wine grape is the Old World grapevine behind most of the world's wine, as well as many table grapes and raisins. It came from the Mediterranean and southwestern Asia, and in the US it's an introduced plant grown as a crop, especially in California and also in places such as Washington, Oregon, New York, Michigan, and Virginia. It's also called the European grape or common grape vine.
Appearance
- Growth form
- A fast-growing woody vine that climbs with tendrils and can reach 40–50 ft (12–15 m).
- Leaves
- Alternate, palmately 3- to 5-lobed, 2–8 in (5–20 cm) long.
- Flowers
- Small, greenish clusters. Cultivated vines have flowers with both male and female parts, so a single vine can set fruit.
- Fruit
- Berries in clusters, green, red, or purple depending on the variety. Wild vines bear small dark berries about 1/4 in (6 mm) across.
Look-alikes
Fox grape has a tendril or flower cluster at every node along the vine, and its thick leaves are covered underneath with dense brown or white hairs. The berries have a skin that slips off when squeezed.
Why they get mixed upIts cultivars, like Concord, are grown alongside vinifera in vineyards and backyards. It is also a native eastern grape crossed with vinifera to make many American hybrid grapes.
Where it lives
- Typical habitats
- Vineyards
- Home gardens
- Range
- Native from Morocco and Portugal across the Mediterranean and central Europe east to northern Iran. In the US it's a cultivated, introduced plant; America's native wild grapes are other Vitis species.
Growing it
- Propagation
- In much of North America it's grafted onto American that resist .
- Toxicity
- Grapes and raisins can cause kidney damage in dogs, even in small amounts.
Name and classification
- About the name
- Botanists split the species into cultivated grapes (subsp. vinifera) and their wild ancestor, the European wild grape (subsp. sylvestris), which has separate male and female plants.
- Varieties and forms
- Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 varieties exist, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Riesling. Many American table and juice grapes, like Concord and Niagara, are fox grape or its hybrids rather than pure vinifera.
Conservation
- IUCN Red List
- LCLeast ConcernLow risk of extinction
Culture and stories
- Culture and stories
- Some of the earliest evidence of domesticated grapes, from about 6000 BC, comes from the country of Georgia in the South Caucasus.
- In the 1800s, phylloxera, a tiny root louse carried to Europe on American vines, wiped out much of Europe's vineyards. The fix was grafting vinifera onto resistant American roots.
More species to explore
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