Since they contain the same alpha hydroxy acids found in expensive facial peels, you can apply the pureed fruits as a masque that will both peel off dead cells and moisturize the skin underneath. Astringent grape leaves once stanched wounds and treated dysentery. Country women still cover crocks of pickles with those leaves too.
The Old World grape, vitis vinifera, prefers long, dry summers, and is susceptible to fungus diseases in the U.S. So most of the varieties grown here were developed from native species like the North American fox grape, vitis vulpina (AKA labrusca--"wild vine" or riparia "river-bank grape"). That wild ancestor of the Concord reportedly saved the members of Lewis and Clark's expedition from starvation. As A. W. Smith adds in A Gardener's Handbook of Plant Names, "It remained for Georg Engelmann, the German-born St. Louis physician, to discover that American grape stocks were virtually proof against the minute plant louse, the phylloxera." So the brash New World types ended up saving some old European vineyards too.
Perhaps vitis vulpina was named for Aesop's fable about a fox which, not being able to reach some grapes, sulkily concludes they were probably bitter anyway. No doubt, that is also where we get the modern expression, "sour grapes." Other wild types include vitis cordifolia with its "heart-shaped foliage", AKA frost or chicken grape, and the western vitis californica.
In The Fragrant Path, Louise Beebe Wilder describes the elusive scent of wild grapes. "The flowers of the Vine are tiny, wholly unnoticeable, yet as you walk or ride along the early summer roads, especially at night, you are suddenly enveloped, caught up so to speak, among tendrils of exquisite fragrance, indescribably gentle yet searching. It searches out old memories, old scenes, old loves, and brings them before you without warning, between two breaths, sometimes with cruel clarity. Someone has called Box the most memory stirring of all fragrances, but to us, in this country, I think it is the scent of the Wild Grape that has power to disarm us and leave us unprotected before memory's shrewd attack."
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