Grape Migrations

By Heidi Noroozy

 

For years I’ve been telling friends this story (usually over a nice glass of red wine): Gaspard de Stérimberg was a thirteenth-century crusader who took a wrong turn on his way to the Holy Land. He ended up in Shiraz, the Persian city known for its blooming gardens and lyrical poets—and for its wine. Gaspard took such a liking to the local vintage that he slipped a few grapevine cuttings into his saddlebags before returning to his home in France. There, he planted the cuttings, turned the mature fruit into a full-bodied wine, and named his new vintage after the city of its origin. A few centuries later, the Shiraz grapes went wandering again and put down roots in Australia.

Nice story, right? Too bad it’s not true.

In 1998, Dr. Carol Meredith, a researcher with the University of California at Davis, tested the DNA of grapevines and determined that the Shiraz variety is native to France and did not originate in Persia at all. Other details of the story don’t hold up under scrutiny, either. Chevalier Gaspard was a real knight, but there’s no evidence that he ever left France, let alone traveled to Jerusalem or Shiraz (which was never the target of a crusade anyway). Our valiant knight had joined the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in the French region of Languedoc.

In another version of the story, the Greeks brought the Shiraz grape to France in 600 BC and planted the vines in their colony of Massilia (present-day Marseilles). Centuries later, Gaspard de Stérimberg encountered the vintage in this region on his way home from the crusades and transplanted some cuttings to his Rhône vineyards. There, he recovered from terrible wounds sustained in the fighting and lived out his days as a hermit—and presumably a gentleman vintner.

This story is more believable, for although Marseilles isn’t in the Languedoc region, it’s not far from it and the grapes could have easily migrated over the course of nearly two millennia. And the city of Shiraz has been part of a major wine-growing region for thousands of years—until the Islamic Republic banned alcohol in the 1980s. But the stickler this time is this: the wine grapes grown in Shiraz were white, while the present-day Shiraz grapes of Australia and France (where they’re called Syrah) are red.

So what is the true story? I doubt anyone will ever sort out these wrinkles in history. But the Shiraz mystery aside, Persia is likely the place where wine originated. Archaeologists uncovered the earliest evidence of winemaking in the residue clinging to 7,000-year-old pottery shards at Hajji Firuz Tepe, an excavation site in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran.

Iranians have another story about the origins of wine: The legendary King Jamshid was fond of grapes. He filled his castle cellars with the fruit so that it could be brought to his table whenever he felt a craving coming on. One day, he sent two servants to fetch a basket of grapes, and when they failed to return, he went to see what was taking so long. He found the men collapsed on the floor, overcome by the fumes from a barrel of bruised and fermenting grapes. The king decided the grapes had turned poisonous and warned everyone to avoid them.

Later, one of Jamshid’s mistresses was feeling sad and neglected and decided to kill herself by drinking the liquid left by the poisoned grapes. But instead of dying, the woman soon felt elated and climbed the cellar steps singing and dancing. The king realized that this miraculous juice had the power to turn despair into joy. It’s probably a good thing he never asked her how she felt the next morning when the hangover hit, or perhaps we wouldn’t have wine today.

This story brings us back to Shiraz because Jamshid is believed to have lived in the site that later became Persepolis, the palace of the Achaemenid rulers, which lies just an hour’s drive from present-day Shiraz. Even today, Iranians refer to Persepolis as “Takht-e Jamshid,” which means the “Throne of Jamshid.”

Science may have proven that the Shiraz grape has a French accent rather than a Persian one and that winemaking originated in the Zagros Mountains and not in King Jamshid’s cellar, but I still prefer the legends. I’ll happily lift a glass to old Gaspard, the French hermit, as I picture him wandering among his vines, or to King Jamshid on his throne at Persepolis, sipping a white Shiraz.

Salamati!

Persepolis: Blending Past and Present

By Heidi Noroozy

Heidi will be back from Iran next week, bursting with new stories to tell. In the meantime, here is a repeat of her Persepolis story from November 2010.

On a clear day, you can see the thirteen stone columns of the Apadana Audience Hall from across the vast plain, just an hour’s drive from the Southern Iranian city of Shiraz. They rise into the blue sky above the ruins of Persepolis, reminding me of lonely tree trunks after a forest fire. Solemn, bleak, and dead.

Built in the fifth century B.C. by Darius I and his son Xerxes, Persepolis was the residential palace of Persia’s Achaemenian kings, where Darius and his descendants staged ceremonies and received visiting heads of state. The actual business of the empire was conducted far away in Susa (modern-day Shush, Iran). The palace’s history is still visible today on its gray stone walls, which depict scenes of Persian New Year ceremonies, camels and carts laden with provisions, and delegates from empire’s far-flung territories bearing tribute to the king of kings.

Persepolis’s glory lasted for only two centuries and came to an end when Alexander the Great conquered and looted the palace complex, then burned it to the ground. Today, the ruins are a source of national pride for Iranians, a symbol of their long-ago Persian empire. So it’s no surprise that they shun the name the Greek conquerors gave the site (Persepolis – City of the Persians) and prefer to call it Takht-e Jamshid or Throne of Jamshid (a legendary Persian king, who probably never actually lived in the palace named after him).

Persepolis may have been abandoned many centuries ago, but it felt anything but dead on the sunny February day when I visited the site. Our expedition began early in the morning when Hassan, the guide my husband had hired for the day, picked us up for the drive from Shiraz to the ruins. A young man with bright eyes and a shiny new wedding ring on his finger, Hassan showed us a picture of his young wife of six months and chatted happily of the baby on the way. When we passed through green fields at the foot of Persepolis’s high plateau, he pointed out the meadows that had belonged to his family. According to local custom, he said, farms are divided up equally between sons, so by the time he came along, his share of the fertile land was too small to support a family. He headed for the city and better job prospects.

By the time we climbed the wide staircase leading to the Xerxes Gate, my mind was filled with images from Hassan’s stories, and all I could think of was how much life had continued here for millennia. How farmers had cultivated the green fields all around the site—and likely also over it during the centuries that the palace ruins lay buried in the ground.

With a blue sky and a light breeze blowing down from the hills, mingling the scents of ancient dust and freshly turned earth, I could practically see the spirits of ancient warriors, kings, and servants climbing the steps to the Apadana Hall, just like their images carved into the side of the staircase wall. We wandered along the boardwalk covering Procession Way, where stone griffins, now chipped and cracked, once looked down on delegations as they made their way to the Hundred Column Hall. Gazing down at round stone bases that used to support long-decayed wooden columns, it was harder to picture life as it had once existed here.

But farther along, after we passed through the Tripylon Gate to the private quarters beyond, I spotted a ginger cat sunning herself in a window of Darius’s Tachara Palace. It’s an image that comes back every time I think of Persepolis. A symbol of how death and life coexist and how history is never lost forever but blends with the present.

When we piled back into Hassan’s car for the drive back to Shiraz, I couldn’t help wondering whether some branch of his family had worked the land back in the days when Persepolis was a living city, and whether a long-ago ancestor had climbed the hill to the palace plateau with food for the royal kitchens. Maybe that ancestor’s spirit also still mounts the steps to the Apadana Hall.

Grape Migrations

Prince Entertained on a Terrace
from "Divan" by Hafez

For years I’ve been telling friends this story (usually over a nice glass of red wine): Gaspard de Stérimberg was a thirteenth-century crusader who took a wrong turn on his way to the Holy Land. He ended up in Shiraz, the Persian city known for its blooming gardens and lyrical poets—and for its wine. Gaspard took such a liking to the local vintage that he slipped a few grapevine cuttings into his saddlebags before returning to his home in France. There, he planted the cuttings, turned the mature fruit into a full-bodied wine, and named his new vintage after the city of its origin. A few centuries later, the Shiraz grapes went wandering again and put down roots in Australia.

Nice story, right? Too bad it’s not true.

In 1998, Dr. Carol Meredith, a researcher with the University of California at Davis, tested the DNA of grapevines and determined that the Shiraz variety is native to France and did not originate in Persia at all. Other details of the story don’t hold up under scrutiny, either. Chevalier Gaspard was a real knight, but there’s no evidence that he ever left France, let alone traveled to Jerusalem or Shiraz (which was never the target of a crusade anyway). Our valiant knight had joined the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in the French region of Languedoc.

In another version of the story, the Greeks brought the Shiraz grape to France in 600 BC and planted the vines in their colony of Massilia (present-day Marseilles). Centuries later, Gaspard de Stérimberg encountered the vintage in this region on his way home from the crusades and transplanted some cuttings to his Rhône vineyards. There, he recovered from terrible wounds sustained in the fighting and lived out his days as a hermit—and presumably a gentleman vintner.

This story is more believable, for although Marseilles isn’t in the Languedoc region, it’s not far from it and the grapes could have easily migrated over the course of nearly two millennia. And the city of Shiraz has been part of a major wine-growing region for thousands of years—until the Islamic Republic banned alcohol in the 1980s. But the stickler this time is this: the wine grapes grown in Shiraz were white, while the present-day Shiraz grapes of Australia and France (where they’re called Syrah) are red.

So what is the true story? I doubt anyone will ever sort out these wrinkles in history. But the Shiraz mystery aside, Persia is likely the place where wine originated. Archaeologists uncovered the earliest evidence of winemaking in the residue clinging to 7,000-year-old pottery shards at Hajji Firuz Tepe, an excavation site in the Zagros Mountains of northwestern Iran.

Photo by Sarah Stierch

Iranians have another story about the origins of wine: The legendary King Jamshid was fond of grapes. He filled his castle cellars with the fruit so that it could be brought to his table whenever he felt a craving coming on. One day, he sent two servants to fetch a basket of grapes, and when they failed to return, he went to see what was taking so long. He found the men collapsed on the floor, overcome by the fumes from a barrel of bruised and fermenting grapes. The king decided the grapes had turned poisonous and warned everyone to avoid them.

Later, one of Jamshid’s mistresses was feeling sad and neglected and decided to kill herself by drinking the liquid left by the poisoned grapes. But instead of dying, the woman soon felt elated and climbed the cellar steps singing and dancing. The king realized that this miraculous juice had the power to turn despair into joy. It’s probably a good thing he never asked her how she felt the next morning when the hangover hit, or perhaps we wouldn’t have wine today.

This story brings us back to Shiraz because Jamshid is believed to have lived in the site that later became Persepolis, the palace of the Achaemenid rulers, which lies just an hour’s drive from present-day Shiraz. Even today, Iranians refer to Persepolis as “Takht-e Jamshid,” which means the “Throne of Jamshid.”

Science may have proven that the Shiraz grape has a French accent rather than a Persian one and that winemaking originated in the Zagros Mountains and not in King Jamshid’s cellar, but I still prefer the legends. I’ll happily lift a glass to old Gaspard, the French hermit, as I picture him wandering among his vines, or to King Jamshid on his throne at Persepolis, sipping a white Shiraz.

Salamati!

Good Luck Lemons

Last spring, I was fretting over my Meyer lemon tree. Weeks of rain brought out a flurry of new green leaves, but nary a blossom. The previous year, you could barely see the leaves for all the tiny white blooms covering them. I could smell their fragrance through my open window as I sat at my computer thinking up clever ways for the villain in my suspense novel to thwart my detective. But after such abundance, the tree seemed to have gone into a sulk.

A friend informed me that the situation was of my own doing. Apparently, I failed to take the proper precautions to ensure ongoing bounty. She wasn’t talking about fertilizer, pruning or proper irrigation.

“Sprinkle some salt around the perimeter,” she advised. “Then burn a bit of esfand and wave the smoke over the tree.” If performed during a season of abundance, this ritual will prevent jealous neighbors from putting the evil eye on the tree and ruining the next year’s crop. Esfand comes from a shrub that grows wild throughout the Middle East, and it produces a strong, woodsy odor when burned.

I have this advice on excellent authority. My friend is from Shiraz, a city in southern Iran, famous for its lovely gardens and fragrant citrus groves. Her family grows Seville oranges in their garden, and the trees are so bountiful that the blossoms end up in a variety of dishes, with plenty remaining to form big, juicy fruit. Some of the blooms add fragrance to tea, while others are turned into moraba-ye bahar-e narenj, or orange blossom preserves. To collect the flowers, the women spread large sheets under the trees, shake the branches until the blossoms snow down all around, then gather them up in the cloths.

I even have the proper tools for protecting my lemon tree from the evil eye:

First, you heat the wand over a flame until the metal coils glow red, then you dip it in a bowl of esfand. The seeds crackle and release their scent in a cloud of pungent smoke. I burn it in my kitchen to get rid of cooking smells, especially fish. My husband complains that this simply replaces one bad smell with another, but I like the scent. It reminds me of hiking in the forest and camp fires.

The ritual precaution seemed to work well for my Shirazi friend, so I tried it. And wouldn’t you know it – my lemon tree is now covered with lovely yellow globes, nearly ready for harvesting, with a second crop of tiny green fruit following close behind. I predict a steady supply of lemons throughout the coming year.

Do you observe any superstitions or rituals in your daily life? How well do they work?