Ancient DNA from a lost Negev Highlands desert grape reveals a Late Antiquity wine lineage

Abstract

Recent excavations of Late Antiquity settlements in the Negev Highlands of southern Israel uncovered a society that established commercial-scale viticulture in an arid environment [D. Fuks et al. , Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117 , 19780–19791 (2020)]. We applied target-enriched genome-wide sequencing and radiocarbon dating to examine grapevine pips that were excavated at three of these sites. Our analyses revealed centuries long and continuous grape cultivation in the Southern Levant. The genetically diverse pips also provided clues to ancient cultivation strategies aimed at improving agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. Applying genomic prediction analysis, a pip dated to the eighth century CE was determined to likely be from a white grape, to date the oldest to be identified. In a kinship analysis, another pip was found to be descendant from a modern Greek cultivar and was thus linked with several popular historic wines that were once traded across the Byzantine Empire. These findings shed light on historical Byzantine trading networks and on the genetic contribution of Levantine varieties to the classic Aegean landscape.

The genetic characterization of grapevines prospected in old Serbian vineyards reveals multiple relationships between traditional varieties of the Balkans

“…Our analyses are not aimed to reveal for how long the varieties identified in this work have been cultivated in the country. In fact, this objective will need of a direct comparison between archaeological and modern samples to provide a historical frame ( Ramos-Madrigal et al., 2019 ; Cohen et al., 2023 ), which, unfortunately, is not feasible in most cases. However, varieties like ‘Plovdina’ (syn.…”

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) analysis reveals ancestry and genetic diversity of cultivated and wild grapevines in Croatia

“…The cultivated germplasm in Croatia laid in a con ned part of the bidimensional space that is delimited by well-known grapevines, which are cultivated in Croatia and beyond in Europe. The few exceptions are represented by three table grapes 'Krivaja Bijela', 'Krivaja Crvena' and 'Mijajuša', the latter of which is a synonym of the popular Greek/Levantine cultivar 'Xeromachairouda' [41] also known as 'Asswad Karech' [42]. In order to rescale the diversity in Croatia relative to the global grapevine diversity, we generated a PCA using 224,695 common variant sites between the sample set of this paper and a WGS diversity panel.…”