Ancient DNA extracted from 28 archaeological grape seeds reveals that viticulture in Spain began with colonists arriving from the eastern Mediterranean about 3,000 years ago—centuries before the Romans set foot on the peninsula. The study also identified grape varieties that are still grown today; one of them has been cultivated continuously for over a millennium.
According to the new study, Hebén—a grape variety still grown in Spanish vineyards—has remained in continuous cultivation for at least the last 1,100 years. This traces its lineage back to around 929 AD, when the Caliphate of Córdoba was proclaimed in southern Spain. That amounts to eleven centuries of uninterrupted farming, evidenced not by written records or oral traditions, but by the plant’s own DNA.
This discovery is part of a larger project to reconstruct the origins of Iberian viticulture using genetic material extracted from archaeological seeds. A research team led by Carolina Royo of the Institute of Grapevine and Wine Sciences (ICVV-CSIC), in collaboration with Guillem Pérez-Jordà of the University of Valencia and Leonor Peña-Chocarro of the CSIC Institute of History, analyzed 28 grape seeds (Vitis vinifera L.) found at archaeological sites on the Iberian Peninsula and Sardinia. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
Ancient DNA analysis works much like a paternity test spanning centuries: instead of comparing the genomes of living people, researchers compare the genomes of plants separated by hundreds or thousands of years to determine their lineage. The results point to the east. The earliest cultivated varieties found on the peninsula proved to be genetically linked to grapes already domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean; all evidence suggests they arrived with colonists who settled in the south and east of the peninsula around 3,000 years ago.
This timeline aligns with archaeological data regarding the arrival of the Phoenicians on the Iberian Peninsula. The founding of Gadir—modern-day Cádiz and a contender for the title of Western Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited city—is generally dated to around 1100 BCE, although the settlement did not fully take shape until the late 9th century BCE.
The Phoenicians—a seafaring trading civilization based in the eastern Mediterranean (roughly in the territory of modern-day Lebanon)—linked East and West through trade networks that spanned over a millennium, and Gadir was one of their first outposts in the western Mediterranean.
The fact that grapevines traveled along these same trade routes alongside other crops and goods comes as no surprise to historians. Until now, however, this had been merely a hypothesis based primarily on written records and pottery. DNA analysis of the seeds transforms this into genetic evidence.
Once introduced, the eastern grapevines did not remain isolated. According to Pérez-Jordà of the Department of Prehistory, Archaeology, and Ancient History at the University of Valencia, the initial cultivated plants soon interbred with local wild populations; these crosses gave rise to the lineages that form the basis of many of the peninsula’s traditional grape varieties. This hybridization is already evident in seeds dating back to the 4th century BCE, indicating that genetic mixing occurred just a few centuries after the emergence of the first domesticated grapevines.
The commercial impetus came later. Researchers found that Phoenician colonization drove the spread of viticulture across the western Mediterranean and that local populations quickly adopted the introduced crop. Vineyards and wine production expanded significantly in southern and eastern Iberia, and by the end of the 8th century BCE, this production had already taken on a distinctly commercial character.
It is worth pausing here to consider the dates. This was more than 500 years before Rome set foot on the peninsula during the Second Punic War, and centuries before wine became culturally linked to Romanization—the process by which conquered territories adopted Roman law, language, and customs. In other words, wine in Spain is not a Roman import; it predates the Roman presence on the Iberian Peninsula by half a millennium.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the study is not the story of its origins, but its resilience. Genetic analysis …allowed researchers to trace the lineage connecting seeds from vastly different periods and, in some cases, directly link these ancient seeds to varieties still grown today.
A team of researchers linked medieval seeds to modern Valencian raisin grapes and demonstrated that the ancestral Hebén variety has been in continuous cultivation for at least 1,100 years. This is a significant finding. Earlier genetic studies of Iberian grapevines had already identified Hebén as the ancestor of numerous varieties currently grown in Spain and Portugal—part of what experts term the Iberian wine-grape group. This group is reportedly one of six major lineages identified among cultivated Vitis vinifera varieties, although this broader classification stems from earlier literature rather than the study in question.
This is not the only recent attempt to decipher the history of wine through the DNA of ancient seeds. In June 2026, a team of researchers from the University of York, led by Oya İnanlı, sequenced the DNA of 80 grape seeds recovered from Etruscan-era wells at Cetamura del Chianti in Tuscany; the results were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The majority of these seeds were found to belong to the same white grape variety—one that the Etruscans and Romans apparently cultivated unchanged for centuries. Earlier that same year—in March 2026—a French team led by Ludovic Orlando published a study in Nature Communications analyzing 49 archaeological grape seeds dating back nearly 4,000 years, primarily from France; the study revealed genetic links to Iberian, Balkan, Levantine, and Caucasian varieties dating back to Roman times.
Compared to the 49 seeds in the French study and the 80 analyzed for Iberia, the 28 seeds examined here represent a smaller sample. Yet, they align with a broader European trend: an increasing number of laboratories are now able to extract and sequence DNA from grape seeds that are thousands of years old, and each new study prompts a re-evaluation of just how widely cultivated plants spread across the ancient Mediterranean.
Some questions remain unresolved. The study does not settle a debate that persists in the field of grapevine genetics: did wild Vitis vinifera populations already growing on the peninsula contribute to the local gene pool before the arrival of the first domesticated Eastern grape varieties, or is the entire cultivated Iberian gene pool ultimately derived from introduced stock?
This question remains a subject of debate among researchers. However, data derived from seed analysis—examining one sample at a time—confirm that grapevines growing in Spain today are nourished by the same soil that sustained vines long before Spain existed as a state.
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