wine regions of France. Most of the wine was
consumed locally, and the grapevines grown
not in vineyards but in sharecroppers’ plots,
between rows of food plants or trained on
trees.
Food Words: Wine, Vine, Grape
Our language bears witness to the fact that
from the very earliest times, people
thought of the grapevine not as the source
of edible fruit, but as the source of wine.
Our words vine and wine come from the
same root word, and that word meant the
fermented juice of the vine’s fruit. This
root is so ancient that it predates the
divergence of Indo-European from other
prehistoric languages of western Asia. The
words for the fruit itself, on the other hand,
are different in different languages. The
English word grape appears to come from
an Indo-European root meaning “curved”
or “crooked,” probably referring to the