History
Gouais is known to have been widely planted in central and northeastern France in Medieval times. At this time, it was used to produce simple, acidic white wines, and were primarily grown in less good plots that were not suited for the much more highly regarded Pinot Noir or Pinot Gris. Gouais Blanc was thus the grape of the peasantry rather than of the nobility.
Its history before Medieval times is not known with any certainty, but is the subject of much conjecture, in similarity to many other grape varieties with a long history. Gouais Blanc has been proposed as a candidate for the grape given to the Gauls by Marcus Aurelius Probus (Roman Emperor 276–282), who was from Pannonia and who overturned Domitian's decree banning grape growing north of the Alps. Another hypothesis claims it originates specifically in Croatia (or Pannonia), but the Vitis International Variety Catalogue currently lists it as originating from Austria, which should probably be interpreted as "likely to originate somewhere in Central Europe".
Gouais Blanc was also grown in the Jura, but the Phylloxera epidemic wiped out the variety in France, and it now survives only in the INRA collection at Domaine de Vassal, Montpellier.
DNA fingerprinting at the University of California, Davis in the late 1990s identified Gouais Blanc as the ancestor of a large number of classical European grape varieties. This came as something of a surprise, given the old division into Frankish and Hunnic grape varieties used in the Germanic world, as it meant that the prototype simple "Hunnic" grape was in fact an ancestor to most of the noble "Frankish" grapes.
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