It's No. 477 of the world, and those things about grapes

As soon as the autumn passed, the grapes in Xi'an City were listed one after another. Green sunshine roses, purple Totai No. 8, red earth, honey-colored seedless white, black rose fragrance... When it is brought to the table, if you only say one sentence, "Eat grapes without spitting grape skins", it will be too annoying. In order to make you the most beautiful boy in front of the fruit plate, I will talk to you about grapes today.

Thousands of miles of special square species, the east with the Han Festival returned.

Dew condenses into bones, and cloud powder stains into clothing.

Soft green due to the long wind, round green belt rain fertilizer.

The gold plate is piled with horse milk, and the bottle is used to add brilliance.

—— "Grapes" Song Kong Wuzhong

Pu Tao wine luminous cup, want to drink pipa immediately urge.

Drunkenly lying on the battlefield Jun Mo smiled, how many people did Gu Lai fight back?

—— "Liangzhou Words" Tang Wang Han

Where do grapes originate?

Grapes, scientific name Vitisvinifera, are plants of the genus Viticulaceae. The Flora of China records this: Woody vine, native to western Asia, is now cultivated all over the world. It is considered to be native to West Asia because it has the earliest history of viticulture. In Book I of the Bible, Genesis, it is written: "Noah was a farmer and the first to cultivate a vineyard. Legend has it that after escaping the flood, Noah planted the first vine on the slopes of mount Aare (at the junction of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran). Since then, grapes have become one of the important crops in the Two Rivers Valley, and gradually spread with human migration and trade activities.

In modern botanical classifications, grapes have three major populations: Eurasian, East Asian and American. The vast majority of the grapes we eat today are domesticated and selected from Eurasian species. The so-called East Asian species are the wild grapes we usually call Vitisdavidii. The Book of Poetry, Feng Feng, and July mentions "June Eclipse And 薁(yù)", while in the Book of Poetry, Zhou Nan (樛木), "Nan has liáo)wood, and Ge Xue (lěi) 纍 (lěi)" in the Book of Poetry. According to research, the "薁" and "Kudzu" mentioned here belong to wild grapes. Unfortunately, these wild grapes have thick skins, sour taste, small fruits, and low edible value, so they have not attracted the attention of their ancestors.

Where do Chinese grapes come from?

Although China is not the origin of grapes, it is also one of the countries with the longest cultivation history. Since ancient times, the accepted theory of the Chinese people was that it was introduced to the Central Plains from central Asia during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. The Chronicle of the Great Wan dynasty records: "Wan's left and right use putao as wine... The Han envoys took the truth, so the Son of Heaven began to plant alfalfa and fertilize the land. "The pota pottery mentioned here is the ancient name of the grape.

From the evolution of the Chinese characters of the name, everyone can see that 80% of the grape is an exotic species. The pronunciation of grapes in Iranian is budawa, and the Han envoy Zhang Qian may have borrowed its pronunciation when he brought it back. In the Wei and Jin dynasties, pu tao was written again, and Emperor Wen of Wei wrote an edict: "There are longan lychees in the south, and Ningbi xiguo putuo and shi mihu." It was not until after the Song Dynasty that the word grape began to become popular in later generations.

Grapes and wine

As a juicy, sugary, and productive fruit, grapes are born with the potential to be winemaking. Wherever grapes are cultivated, there is a tradition of using it to make wine. As early as 3800 years ago, in the Two Rivers Valley, the first written code of mankind promulgated by the ancient Babylonian Kingdom, the Code of Hammurabi, already had a legal provision on the sale of wine.

Although the introduction of grapes has been since the Han Dynasty, due to the lag in cultivation technology, the development of large-scale grape cultivation is very slow, coupled with the fact that the Central Plains people have long fed on grains, and the use of grains to make wine has always been the mainstream, so before the Tang Dynasty, wine was still rare and expensive in China. According to the Book of Continuation of the Han Dynasty, "Fufeng Mengtuo left Zhang Rang with wine, that is, he thought that Liangzhou had stabbed history." "The so-called Yihu is about 30 kilograms now. It is equivalent to replacing a vice-provincial official position with five boxes of dry red now. I think that the wines from the Western Regions at that time were really strange! No wonder even the great poet Su Dongpo could not help but sigh when he read this history: "The general did not fight a hundred battles, and Bo Lang won Liangzhou." ”

In the Tang Dynasty, the Central Plains became increasingly prosperous, and the cultivation and brewing of grapes began to flourish. In 640, Emperor Taizong of Tang ordered Hou Junji, the grand commander of the Jiaohe River March, to lead troops to pacify Gaochang. The Taiping Imperial Records record: "And break Gaochang, harvest horse milk grapes and plant them in the garden, and obtain its wine method..." This is the first time in the mainland history books that it is clearly recorded that the mainland uses the method of the brothers in the western region to make wine.

The rice wine often drunk by the Tang people is brewed with grain and grain steamed and supplemented with koji, and the wine color is clear and transparent, and the taste is mellow; The wine is naturally fermented with the flesh of the grapes and the juice with the skin, and the color is bright and the fragrance is like a beauty. Therefore, once the wine is on the market, it is called "fine wine" by the literati who love to drink. Since then, this fine wine has become the best of the high society's feasts, so much so that it must be drunk with such exquisite wine utensils as luminous glasses.

"Li Bai has a hundred poems, and the restaurant sleeps on Chang'an Avenue", this is a poem describing Li Bai in Du Fu's "Eight Immortals in Drinking". Poetry is a good wine, especially a love of wine. So much so that when he sang "Xiangyang Song" on the upper floor of Yueyang, he was eager to live for a hundred years, and every day he was immersed in wine: "... Cormorant, parrot cup, 36,000 days in a hundred years, 300 cups in one day. Looking at the duck head green of the Han River from a distance, it is just the pōho (pō) mash..."

Grapes and Chang'an

Whether it is a strong man or a prosperous Tang Dynasty, the earliest grape planting is undoubtedly in the area of the capital City of Chang'an. In the Quan Tang Poems, Zhang Chen's "Last night Pu Tao was first put on the shelves, and now the willows are half-weeping embankment", as well as the Shen Qi period's "A thousand flowers of yang willows are blooming, and the beginning of pu tuo's hundred zhangs" all depict a derivative of grapes everywhere in the Western Capital City in spring. The early Tang Dynasty poet Li Yi's "Chang'an Spring Things Are Old, and The Small Garden is Full of Flowers" compares grapes to chang'an's representative wind objects to chant.

However, since the Tang Dynasty, the grapes of Chang'an have always been a representative crop of the courtyard economy in front of the farmhouse and the back of the house, and have not formed an industry. On the contrary, it gradually moved eastward and northward, forming a scale of branches and leaves in Hebei and Shanxi. Since the Ming Dynasty, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Huguang, and Yunnan have also developed one after another, gradually forming a situation of national flowering. Unlike European and American countries, which mainly make wine from grapes, Chinese grapes have been used as good fruits for fresh food since ancient times. As the Qing Dynasty scholar Lu Qiu can say: "Orange grapefruit is difficult to match, there are lychees, and the price can be negotiated." ”

In the 1980s, with the introduction of fresh table grape varieties represented by Jufeng grapes, the scene of grapes planted everywhere in Chang'an in the past returned. Since 1996, when the farmer breeder Ji Jian successfully bred the "Hutai No. 8" in Huxian (now Enyi District) with Jufeng grapes as the mother, Xi'an's grape industry has opened a new situation. Due to its early ripening, abundant yield, stress resistance, storage and transportation resistance, Hutai No. 8 has become a well-known high-quality grape variety in Shaanxi and has been introduced to many places. The districts and counties around Xi'an City alone have formed a scale of nearly 100,000 mu, which has become the main industry for local farmers to get rid of poverty and get rich.

In recent years, with the continuous advancement of biological breeding technology, new varieties of fresh table grapes have become increasingly abundant, and varieties such as sunshine rose, red parador, Jingyou, sapphire and other varieties have also begun to take root in Xi'an. Xi'an, with the vast mind and boldness of its former Tang Dynasty capital, is accepting the new members of these grape families and sending them to the table of the general public. Li Bo/Wen