2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
If you trace the relationship between a person and a grape, you get a picture that resembles the relationship of two lovers who, they cannot live without each other, then start a feud that threatens to destroy one of the parties. The defenseless side is, of course, grapes, which are not yet able to cope with such a sharp change in human feelings. Unless, sometimes, to take, and to prick a rushing man with his thorns
Milk of the Old Men
For seven thousand years, and possibly much more, man has been growing grapes to turn their juicy berries into wine. This is evidenced by archaeological finds in Egypt and China.
The Almighty thought out everything well before expelling a person from the heavenly tabernacles, so that as few problems as possible would arise in a person with health. He supplied the infants with mother's milk, which contains all the necessary components for the growth and development of the child, and for adults he created wonderful vines by planting a yeast fungus on the surface of their juicy fruits.
A person could only knead the fruits in a large container, and then it was up to the fungi that could turn grape juice into healthy and tasty wine.
For an adult's body, wine is a life-giving elixir that helps the body process fatty foods without disastrous health outcomes. This is especially true for people of old age, when it is more and more difficult for the body to fight for good health itself. The Greek philosopher Plato realized this as early as 4 centuries BC and ranked wine as a dairy product for the elderly.
The variety of grapes
The variety of grape varieties is so great that some talk about a figure approaching 8 thousand, and, for example, Virgil, the poet of Ancient Rome, compared the number of grape varieties with the number of grains of sand in the Libyan desert. But will there be anyone willing to count them?
From this amount, you can always choose a variety that suits the living conditions in a particular place in order to get a decent harvest of magic fruits. There are varieties that, under favorable conditions, show the world grape clusters weighing more than 9 kg, and one such vine will fill the body of an 8-ton truck with fruits.
Donkey wisdom
The tall trees of Ancient Rome were forced to bear the weight of the vine with fruits, since in those days there was no fashion to shorten the speed of plants, and a lot of grape wine was required, because it was drunk instead of tea.
Harvesting was a dangerous undertaking, because, if a person could not keep up, tearing off a bunch of grapes could not only break his arms and legs, but also say goodbye to life. Therefore, the collection of fruits began with the writing of a will by the workers in case of a tragic departure.
An ordinary donkey helped people solve the problem with height, wandered into the vineyard and decided on this occasion to feast on grape leaves. The owner's initial anger towards the donkey was replaced by surprise when the most prolific clusters grew on the plucked part of the plant.
Enemies of grapes
Many people love to feast on nutritious grapes.
In the second half of the 19th century, European vineyards were attacked by a tiny but gluttonous phylloxera aphid that almost left Europe without wine.
Aphids, like her fellow countryman, the Colorado potato beetle, bypassing customs rules, moved from America, where the grapes were resistant to her attacks, to Europe and began to suck the juices from the roots of grape plantations. They managed to cope with it by trick, creating "prefabricated" plants, where the roots were cuttings of American grapes, to which the cultivated European vine was grafted.
Unfortunately, from time to time the enemy of grapes becomes a person who decides to fight drunkenness. Then huge vineyards are destroyed, which is much more difficult to restore after the "hangover" than to destroy.
It would seem that the emergence of Islam, which prohibits the drinking of alcoholic beverages, would be another threat to grapes. But the Muslims chose a different path, breeding wonderful table grapes.
