Formed from the Greek ampelos, “vine”, ampelography is a discipline common to botany and oenology that deals with the vine cultivars grown in viticulture: grape varieties. The main aim of ampelography is to describe the morphology of grape varieties in terms of buds, herbaceous shoots, mature leaves, bunches, shoots…

This discipline has its roots in a scientific publication edited between 1901 and 1910 by Pierre Viala and Victor Vermorel: Ampélographie. A general treatise on viticulture. This book describes 5,200 grape varieties and illustrates over 500 of them.

But if vines have been grown since the Romans, why wait so long? In fact, there are agronomists as far back as antiquity who were already trying to study the different grape varieties in order to know which ones to plant in Gaul. The most famous of these is Columella, whose writings are still used today to trace the origins of the oldest grape varieties. Renaissance agronomists such as Olivier de Serres, the father of French agronomy, also studied vine cultivation, diseases, grape and vine pruning… but without precisely classifying and describing the different grape varieties.

It wasn’t until the phylloxera epidemic at the end of the 19th century that Viala and Vermorel undertook the first real work on grape variety classification and description. In the post-war years, Pierre Galet continued their work, developing the classification and description method that is still the benchmark today. This method is based on the study of several elements such as budding, young leaves, shoots, bunches… In the 21st century, the development of genetics has made it possible to go even further in the identification and history of grape varieties.