Zante currant

Vitis corinthiaca violacea - Purple Corinthian Grape

The Purple Corinthian Grape has fascinated for centuries with a botanical singularity: its perfect hermaphrodite flowers, equipped with all reproductive organs, invariably produce seedless fruits. Poiteau, in his Pomologie Française, meticulously describes this enigma: five ovules per ovary, all destined to systematically abort. This programmed sterility makes this grape a textbook case for 19th-century botanists, and a delight for gourmets.

Much more developed than its white cousin, this grape variety stands out with its large, deep green leaves, cut into five toothed lobes and covered with a whitish down on the underside.

Its clusters, four to six inches long, hang from slender stems sometimes equipped with tendrils. The berries, small and perfectly round, reach 6 to 10 millimeters in diameter when ripe. Exposed to the sun, they take on a translucent yellowish hue marbled with softened reddish-purple, covered with a slight whitish bloom. Their somewhat firm skin contains juicy and pleasant flesh that takes on the color of the skin.

But this demanding grape requires warmth and patience: its late growth and tendency to drop fruit necessitate a full south espalier exposure. Fertile, a single plant is enough to supply a large household.

This plate is taken from the Traité des Arbres Fruitiers by Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin, a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference in 19th-century naturalistic illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.