Tirêya Hov: The Wild Grape of the Zagros and the Vine That Fed the World In the river valleys and forest margins of the Zagros mountains — in the oak woodlands of Kurdistan Province and Kermanshah and Ilam, in the rocky slopes above the rivers that run down from the Kurdish highlands toward the lowlands of Mesopotamia — a vine grows wild that this series has been approaching for one hundred and forty-six articles without naming directly. Vitis vinifera subsp. sylvestris: th

Tirê Hov: The Kurdish Wild Grape and the Mountain Where Wine Was Born Scientists who study the origin of wine have a name for the place where it began: the Grape’s Fertile Triangle. It is a vast upland region bounded by three mountain ranges: the Taurus Mountains of eastern Turkey, the northern Zagros Mountains of western Iran, and the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Within this triangle, the wild ancestor of every wine grape and every table grape in