WHAT IS AMPELOGRAPHY

The term Ampelography is used for the first time by the doctor and naturalist Philip Jacob Sachs (1661) in his encyclopaedic work on the vine and wine.
The term is used in its modern meaning by Simon de Roxas in his book Ensayo sobre las variedades de la vid común que vegetan en Andalucía (1807). It is used consciously in its modern meaning for the first time by Count Alexandre- Pierre Odart (Tours, 1841) in his Ampélographie ou Traité des cépages les plus estimés dans tous les vignobles de quelque renom. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of a “Universal Ampelography”, that is the discipline able to describe all the vine varieties in the world, is explained through the work of Giuseppe di Rovasenda Saggio di una ampelografia universale, published in Turin in 1877, as well as through the modification of the title of the work of Odart, that is transformed to "Ampélographie universelle" and also in the great work by Viala and Vermorel.