ABSTRACT
Wine, the fermented juice of ripe grapes, has been produced and consumed by humans for longer than anyone can remember. Wine making begins in the vineyard, first with the selection of grapevines to be planted, then continues with the spacing of those vines, their training on trellises or growth as individual standing plants, their annual pruning, and finally culminates in their general care and maintenance: Good wines require healthy vines. Although there are several thousand varieties of grapes in the Vitis vinifera family, less than one hundred of them are important in American viticulture today in the 1990s, and most wines produced in the United States are made from far fewer cultivars. From a broad center of early domestication in the Transcaucasian region, cultivars of Vitis vinifera began journeys in at least three different directions—eastward and southeastward into Asia, southwestward into Egypt, and westward through Anatolia to Greece.
