600-year-old pinot noir grape found in medieval French toilet

PARIS

A 600-year-old grape seed discovered in the toilets of a medieval French hospital is genetically identical to the grapes still being used to make pinot noir wine, scientists said on March 24.

The seed reveals that people in France have been cultivating this immensely popular variety of grape since at least the 1400s, the scientists said in a new study.

It is not possible to say whether the fruit was "eaten like table grapes or whether people made wine from it at the time", study co-author Laurent Bouby told AFP.

But the research provides a link between modern France, one of the world's largest wine-producing and -consuming countries, and its distant wine-loving past.

Another study co-author, Ludovic Orlando, pointed out that the Hundred Years' War between England and France finally wrapped up in the mid-1400s.

And the brief life of France's patron saint, Joan of Arc, was also in the 15th century.

"She could have eaten the same grapes as us," the paleogeneticist at the University of Toulouse told AFP.

The seed was found in a toilet in a 15th-century hospital in Valenciennes in northern France. At the time, toilets were sometimes used as rubbish bins, the researchers explained.

The study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications, involved sequencing the genome of 54 grape seeds dating from the Bronze Age — from around 2,300 B.C. — to the Middle Ages.

It confirms that generations of winegrowers had been using what are today called "clonal propagation" techniques, such as preserving cuttings of particular grape varieties for 600 years, the researchers said.

Ancient texts had offered indications this was happening, "but outside of paleogenomics, it is very difficult to characterize this technique," said Bouby of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier.

But the new research found evidence this technique was being used in many areas as far back as the Iron Age, around 625-500 B.C.

The oldest grapes analyzed in the study were from wild vines in the French region of Nimes dated to around 2,000 B.C. Domesticated vines then started to appear between 625 and 500 B.C. in France's southern Var region.

This lines up with when colonizing Greeks were believed to have introduced viticulture, cultivating grapevines, to France, after founding the city of Marseille.