Calitor
Italian grape variety
Calitor or Calitor noir is a red French wine grape variety. It was previously widely cultivated in southern France, in particular in Provence, but is now very rare, almost extinct. Historically used as mainly a blending variety, Calitor gives high yields and produces a light-bodied and lightly colored wine. When grown on hillside sites, it can give a wine of character.
Calitor is a very old variety that was first noted growing in southern France in 1600. The grape has produced two color mutations, Calitor blanc, which has been growing in the Costières de Nîmes region since at least 1782, and a pink-berried Calitor gris which are both not widely grown. Plantings of Calitor noir, itself, have been steadily declining since the early 20th century as French wine producers turned first to the more reliably productive Aramon noir and later to higher quality international varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. In 1968, there were 319 hectares (790 acres) of Calitor noir in France but by 2008 that number had dropped to just 31 hectares (77 acres).
History
Ampelographers believe that the name Calitor is derived from the Provençal words Col (meaning "stalk") and tor (meaning "twisted") and was likely a reference to the near right angle bent of the peduncle stalk of Calitor bunches as they hang on the vine. The earliest synonyms of Calitor, Col Tor and Pécoui-Touar, mean literally "twisted stalks".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Calitor” is italian grape variety. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Calitor, Italian and grape, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1027038. The first chronological checks are 1600, 1782, 1968 and 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Calitor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.