varieties are somewhat obscure today, and have never achieved anything near Syrah's fame or popularity, and there is no record of them ever having been cultivated at long distances from their present homes. Thus, both of Syrah's parents come from a limited area in southeastern France, close to northern Rhône. Based on these findings, the researchers have concluded Syrah originated from northern Rhône. The DNA typing leaves no room for doubt in this matter, and the numerous other hypotheses of the grape's origin which have been forwarded during the years all completely lack support in the form of documentary evidence or ampelographic investigations, be it by methods of classical botany or DNA. Instead, they seem to have been based primarily or solely on the name or synonyms of the variety. Varying orthography for grape names render dubious any name-based evidence of origins. Nevertheless, origins such as Syracuse or the famous Iranian city of Shiraz have been proposed while the genomic studies had yet to be done. The parentage information, however, does not reveal how old the grape variety is, i.e., when the pollination of a Mondeuse blanche vine by Dureza took place, leading to the original Syrah seed plant. In the year AD 77, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia about the wines of Vienne (which today would be called Côte-Rôtie), where the Allobroges made famous and prized wine from a dark-skinned grape variety that had not existed some 50 years earlier, in Virgil's age. Pliny called the vines of this wine Allobrogica, and it has been speculated that it could be today's Syrah. However, the description of the wine would also fit, for example, Dureza, and Pliny's observation that vines of Allobrogica were resistant to cold is not entirely consistent with Syrah. The names Syrah and Shiraz The grape is called Syrah in its country of origin, France, as well as in the rest of Europe, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, New Zealand and South Africa. The name "Shiraz" became popular for this grape variety in Australia, where it has long been established as the most grown dark-skinned variety. In Australia, it was also commonly called Hermitage up to the late 1980s, but since that name became a French Protected Designation of Origin, this naming practice caused a problem in some export markets and was dropped. The grape's many other synonyms are used in various parts of the world,