For someone with a contrarian streak, the existence of all those cultivars suggests that grapes weren’t the perfect ingredient for boozemaking we’ve been led to believe. If grapes are so great, why did we need so many different custom versions? That’s the less Panglossian take on grape domestication Myles offers. “They happened to be the juiciest fruit in the Fertile Crescent when everything was getting domesticated,” he says. “If the world’s primary center of cultural development had been in Melanesia it could be that we’d all be sipping on fermented coconut juice and we’d have all these
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