Pinot noir’s grip on people’s tastebuds is surprisingly old

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

In wine there is truth, to quote Pliny the Elder—truth about humans, that is. Wine has been a staple of human drinking for thousands of years: it is captured in the frescoes in Pompeii, and celebrated in epic poems like the Iliad and the Odyssey. It was found inside King Tut’s tomb, in trace amounts on 9,000 year old Chinese pottery and written about in the Bible. But despite its ubiquity and enduring popularity, scientists have struggled to place exactly when and how humans first made wine as we might recognize it today.

And now, a new study of ancient grape seeds found across France adds to the puzzle, revealing that humans have been consuming at least one grape variety for hundreds of years.

Researchers analyzed the DNA of nearly 50 wild and domestic grape seeds collected at archaeological sites mostly across France. The pips dated from the Bronze Age, or around 2300 BCE, through to 1500 CE—nearly 4,000 years.

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Comparing the pips’ DNA to each other and that of modern wine varietals revealed a “very surprising” finding, says Ludovic Orlando, the study’s senior author and research director of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse at the University of Toulouse, in France. Some of the ancient grapes had been cloned.

Starting in the mid-Iron Age (around 500 B.C.E.), some of the grape seeds had the same or highly similar DNA. That means that French winemakers across the country must have switched from domesticating wild grapes to propagating them directly—that is, cloning them, by taking cuttings of a plant to start new groves. The results shed more light on the history of wine in France, a region world-famous for its wine, as well as across the globe.

Interestingly, one of the cloned grape samples dating back to Medieval times was “genetically identical” to pinot noir, a grape widely grown throughout the world today, says Orlando.

“We found the very same plant, 600 years ago in the 15th century,” Orlando says, “the century of Joan of Arc.” What this means is that not only has pinot noir endured in popularity for centuries, but people liked it so much that they haven’t changed it much over all that time. “They kept it as it was, propagated as a clone—as a photocopy—for centuries, literally,” he says.

As to whether today’s pinot tastes the same as whatever Medieval knights were knocking back in the French royal court at Paris, grape DNA can’t reveal much about flavor. Wine is a multifaceted product of grape variety, fermentation process, environment and additives.

“Wine is a complex biocultural product,” Orlando says. But the DNA may illuminate some aspects, like sugar content and grape size. Ultimately, there is much to learn about the history of wine—and, as Pliny the Elder said—us.

“Wine and grapes are biological and cultural. Think about which your favorite wine or my favorite wine—it tells something about you, as well as about your culture,” Orlando says.

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