After the last post, I looked up grapes on wiki. I looked up redcurrants, black currants, gooseberries. (The page for gooseberries was not available.) I looked up a couple of Bible quotes referring to grapes (and found that the majority of versions of the Bible online come through a source called BibleGateway). I looked up a couple of pieces of research regarding grapes and health, science articles listed in the Grapes bibliography on Wikipedia.

(An aside - if it seems I've come to rely upon Wiki too much, ignoring other more specialized resources from varied sources, it's because I have little access to other resources. Wiki is still easily accessible, and seems to have self-correcting mechanisms when articles are tampered with.)

A few observations after skimming through these articles:

One can learn a lot about our world beginning with the word grapes.

Grapes grow on vines. If we have no vines we have no grapes.

There's a sentence in the Wiki article that mentions that yeast naturally exists on the skins of grapes, enhancing the course of natural fermentation into wine.

Red wines have more active properties than whites because red wines are fermented with the grape skins. They also have a stronger fragrance.

I don't like to say grapes have medicinal properties because then we get into the issue of drugs and does it really work on this or that? and how much is good for you and who should have access to it and who should not. Grapes simply have a lot to offer toward our well-being and pleasure in life. Ideally, grapes would be available to us all: jams and raisins and wines and right off the vines. The content of the articles, and memories of the poignant, sweet piercing feeling the body has in response to a single wild berry such as a gooseberry or currant or a wild grape - the taste containing the essence of sun, rain, dirt - reminds me, yes - this is good.