A 600-year-old grape seed discovered in the toilet of a medieval French hospital is genetically identical to the grapes still being used to make pinot noir wine, scientists said Tuesday.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.AdvertisementAdvertisementBut 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,” Orlando, a 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.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe 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 BC — 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.More in ScienceAncient 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 Scienc …
