But where are you really from?

It’s a fair question to ask of our most familiar grape varieties, following new research that overturns preconceptions about the way Vitis vinifera evolved. David Williams reports

The past month has seen a massive shake-up of our understanding of the earliest origins of wine. The cause of this academic kerfuffle was presented at length in a research paper, published in the journal Science at the beginning of March, which has challenged the most recent consensus on the evolution of Vitis vinifera.

For the past couple of decades, scientists in the field had believed that Vitis vinifera had evolved in a single geographical centre in the Caucasus in modern-day Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, around 8,000 years ago. But the Science paper sets out the case for an earlier and more geographically dispersed development, stating that Vitis vinifera was domesticated from two distinct populations of wild vines, in two distinct geographical centres: one in the South Caucasus and one in the “Near East” (modern day Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan), 11,000 years ago.

The paper goes on to state that the Vitis vinifera varieties grown today in Western Europe are descendants of the Levantine branch, the product of cross-pollinations with wild grape species as the early Vitis vinifera varieties migrated westwards. The grape varieties of the modern-day Caucasus, meanwhile, are the products of their own, distinct development.

Reading about the dual-development theory has brought a whole new dimension to my relationship with Georgian grape varieties: knowing that Saperavi has an entirely different lineage to, say, Syrah, brings an extra layer of meaning to wines that, even when they’re sipped blind and stripped entirely of context, have such a strong, instantly recognisable, inimitable personality.

The paper’s findings have also enriched and extended that wonderful, if slightly dizzying sense of connecting to deep history you can get with wine sometimes. Take a sip of even the most mediocre wine and you’re participating in a culture that has endured for millennia – there’s something both humbling and uplifting about that.

Above, all I like the way the new understanding of vinous evolution reinforces the idea of wine as an essentially cosmopolitan and dynamic thing, its character fundamentally shaped by migration and interbreeding and crosscultural connections.

This last idea is something that is often under-played in the modern wine world, which tends to privilege notions of permanence and tradition over dynamism and change, whether it’s the sometimesunthinking devotion to the not always clearly defined idea of terroir, or the preference for “local” or “indigenous” over “international” interloper grape varieties.

Not that the pull of tradition isn’t perfectly understandable and even, at times, commendable. The Ark of Taste – the Slow Food organisation’s online catalogue of small-scale food and drink products threatened with imminent extinction thanks to “industrial agriculture, environmental degradation and homogenisation” – lists 122 wine products and grape varieties. So when a Loire producer chooses to use the Ark-listed Romorantin rather than Chardonnay, or a Bulgarian grower goes for Zarchin over Cabernet, it’s hard not to see it as a blow struck for conservation and biodiversity, and against the sometimes-overbearing presence of the handful of French varieties that have spread everywhere wine is made.

For all that wines made from rescued local grape varieties

– such as Greece’s Malagousia (all but extinct before the 1990s revival led by Vangelis Gerovassiliou) or Portugal’s Jampal (the passion project of Brazilian ex-footballer André Manz) – are vitally important contributors to the sum of vinous happiness, there is a danger, sometimes, that an essentially benign traditionalist impulse can tip over into a narrowly conservative mindset. In its own way, ultratraditionalism is as threatening to vinous diversity as the shorttermist grubbing up of precious old vines. It can lead to rigidity about what grape varieties can work where – and discounts the potentially galvanising effects of outside influences and materials.

Let me give you an example. Last month I was on the panel for a tasting of Mencía put on by Decanter magazine. Mencía is a poster child for the 21stcentury focus on local varieties, a red that has been successfully reinvented as a quality (rather than bulk) variety over the past 20 years in its north western Spanish heartland. The tasting was inevitably dominated by samples from Bierzo in León and a handful of Galician DOs, and it was wines from one of the Galicians, Ribeira Sacra, that provided most of our highest-scoring wines. But for me and at least one other member of the panel, one of the strongest contenders for wine of the tasting was Baldovar 923 Cerro Negro, a 100% Mencía, from, of all places, Valencia.

Before tasting the wine, I would almost certainly have said that this was a western Iberian fish out of fresh Atlantic water over in the Mediterranean east. When ambitious growers can work magic with local Bobal, Mando and Merseguera, why do we need this Valencian-Galician fusion?

The 20-year-old Mencía vines used for Cerro Negro provided their own gorgeously compelling answer, with a wine that has much of the same alluring slinky texture as its Galician peers but with a distinctive, herbal Mediterranean lilt all of its own.

A true original, in other words, and a tribute to wine’s enduring, 11,000-year-old cosmopolitan streak.