ABSTRACT
There is no ecological reason why the vine could not have been established very early in North Africa, long before the arrival of the Phoenicians. The Maghreb lies well within the primitive range of wild grape (see chapter 9 by Zohary, this volume) and the climate along the Mediterranean seaboards of modern Morocco, Algeria and especially Tunisia is quite hospitable to cultivated vines (Map 19.1). North Africa in many ways resembled the Phoenicians’ homeland in coastal Lebanon, where the typical Mediterranean triad of cereals, olive and grape had already been established for millennia. North Africa, in short, was environmentally pre-adapted to viticulture, needing only human agents to introduce cultivated vine into a pristine landscape.
