Grapes Trivia | 50 facts about the sweet fruit

Grapes are quite popular fruits, mostly because wine is made out of them. Despite that fact they are also delightful, and beneficial for our health.

Let’s find out more about it!

A grape is a fruit of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus Vitis.
It is botanically considered a berry.
Grapes can be eaten fresh as table grapes or they can be used for making wine, jam, grape juice, jelly, grape seed extract, raisins, vinegar, and grape seed oil.
Grapes are a non-climacteric type of fruit.
They are generally occurring in clusters.
The Middle East is generally described as the homeland of grape.
The cultivation of this plant began there 6,000–8,000 years ago.
Yeast, one of the earliest domesticated microorganisms, occurs naturally on the skins of grapes, leading to the discovery of alcoholic drinks such as wine.
The earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of wine-making in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in Georgia.
The oldest known winery was found in Armenia.
It is dating back to around 4000 BC.
By the 9th century AD, the city of Shiraz was known to produce some of the finest wines in the Middle East.
Thus it has been proposed that Syrah red wine is named after Shiraz, a city in Persia where the grape was used to make Shirazi wine.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics record the cultivation of purple grapes, and history attests to the ancient Greeks, Cypriots, Phoenicians, and Romans growing purple grapes both for eating and wine production.
The growing of grapes would later spread to other regions in Europe, as well as North Africa, and eventually in North America.
In 2005 a team of archaeologists concluded that some Chalcolithic wine jars, which were discovered in Cyprus in the 1930s, were the oldest of their kind in the world, dating back to 3,500 BC.
Moreover, Commandaria, a sweet dessert wine from Cyprus, is the oldest manufactured wine in the world, its origins traced as far back as 2000 BC.
In North America, native grapes belonging to various species of the genus Vitis proliferate in the wild across the continent, and were a part of the diet of many Native Americans, but were considered by early European colonists to be unsuitable for wine.
In the 19th century, Ephraim Bull of Concord, Massachusetts, cultivated seeds from wild Vitis labrusca vines to create the Concord grape which would become an important agricultural crop in the United States.
Grapes are a type of fruit that grow in clusters of 15 to 300.
It can be crimson, black, dark blue, yellow, green, orange, and pink.
“White” grapes are actually green in color, and are evolutionarily derived from the purple grape.
Mutations in two regulatory genes of white grapes turn off production of anthocyanins, which are responsible for the color of purple grapes.
Anthocyanins and other pigment chemicals of the larger family of polyphenols in purple grapes are responsible for the varying shades of purple in red wines.
Grapes are typically an ellipsoid shape resembling a prolate spheroid
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 75,866 square kilometers of the world are dedicated to grapes.
Approximately 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, and 2% as dried fruit.
A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be reconstituted for fruits canned “with no added sugar” and “100% natural”.
The area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year.
It is believed that the most widely planted variety is Sultana, also known as Thompson Seedless, with at least 3,600 km² (880,000 acres) dedicated to it.
The second most common variety is Airén. Other popular varieties include Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Grenache, Tempranillo, Riesling, and Chardonnay
The word “berry” actually meant “grape” in Old English.
This isn’t the case. Table grapes, or those you eat raw, are distinctly different. They have a thin skin, and over the years, farmers have bred them to be seedless or have very small seeds. Wine grapes, on the other hand, are smaller and have thicker skins and lots of seeds.
A scientific review published in the journal Trends in Genetics reports that most researchers believe grapes are at least 65 million years old. Some of today’s grape varieties are direct descendants of these ancient grapes.
There are more than 8,000 different grape varieties known to scientists.
These include wine grapes and table grapes, most of which originated in Europe and the Americas.
Top grape producers include Spain, Italy, China, and Turkey.
Grapes are high in vitamin C.
Self Nutrition Data reports that they actually contain more than a quarter of the vitamin C you need in a day.
Grapes are also high in vitamin K, and they contain no fat or cholesterol.
In 1970, the average person consumed 2.9 pounds of grapes each year. By 2009, yearly consumption has increased to 7.9 pounds per person.
The United States Department of Agriculture reports that the US is the world’s largest importer of grapes for eating. In 2012, the US imported 568,000 tons of table grapes.
It requires about 90 pounds of grapes to make five gallons or about 25 bottles of wine, according to Wine Maker Magazine. That equates to more than three and a half pounds of grapes per bottle.
Some people also use extracts from grape seeds for medicinal purposes.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Dinesh Shivnath Upadhyaya Mumbai, India holds the record for eating the most grapes ever in a period of three minutes. He consumed 205 grapes in that three minute period in 2015 and had to pick each grape up individually in order to do so.
Forbes reports that the most widely grown grape variety in the world is the Kyoho, a table grape grown in China.
The grapes are similar to Concord grapes and generally served peeled. The most popular wine grape in the world is Cabernet Sauvignon.
Seeds are important for grape reproduction, so how can there even be seedless grapes? The answer lies in cloning; that is, taking a cutting of a vine, dipping it in rooting hormone, and allowing it to root and grow into a new plant.
In the mid-1800s, France and other European vineyards had many of their grapes wiped out by a blight from phylloxera, a small aphid believed to have originated in North America and traveled to Europe on ships.
Growers discovered that American vines were resistant to phylloxera, so European vines were grafted onto North American rootstock in order to overcome the epidemic.