Vine (grapevine)

A vine is the wine plant itself, the perennial climbing plant on which the grapes for wine grow. Almost all classic wine is made from the species Vitis vinifera, which originally comes from the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The vine consists of a root system, a trunk and the shoots and tendrils where the leaves sit and where flowers later turn into bunches of grapes. So it is the vine that produces the raw material for everything you later taste in the glass.

The vine matters a great deal for quality, because it lives in interplay with soil, climate and grape variety. An important point is that most vines today are grafted onto roots from American species. This happened after the pest phylloxera destroyed large parts of Europe's vineyards in the late 1800s, and the resistant root became the solution. The choice of root and variety, as well as how the vine is pruned and trained, governs how many and how concentrated the grapes it yields will be.

You can recognise a vine by the gnarled, woody trunk of older plants, while the young shoots are thin and supple. A common misconception is that a high grape yield is best. Often it is the opposite: a vine that carries fewer, smaller grapes gives a more concentrated flavour and therefore a more expressive wine.