An old red of the Ardèche that all but died out, remembered today for one reason above all: it is the father of Syrah. When DNA typing at the end of the 1990s set out to unmask the parentage of the northern Rhône's great grape, it named an obscure local variety, Dureza, crossed with Mondeuse Blanche of neighbouring Savoie — a discovery published by Bowers, Meredith and colleagues between 1998 and 2000 that dissolved the romantic legend of a vine carried home from Persia.
Dureza itself never made famous wine. By the time it was identified it had shrunk to a handful of vines held in ampelographic conservatories, a grape preserved rather than grown. That it survived at all is what let the question be answered — a near-extinct variety whose whole importance now lies in the child it left to the world.
Family
Documented parentage — the nearer the ring, the closer the kinship
Dashed ties are mutations (the same variety, not a cross). Grey nodes are forebears without an article of their own.