Red, green, and sour grapes: They’ve got nothing on the Concord grape, America’s most mysterious fruit.

When I was growing up, my family would often travel to Korea, the country of my heritage. Each time, my sister and I gleefully looked forward to getting our hands on the things we couldn’t easily get anywhere else—fruit especially. We feasted on Korean melon, persimmons, Asian pears, and what we thought of as “Korean grapes.”

The grapes were always the star of the show. They tasted like grape candy. Spherical with dark blue-purple skin, they aren’t eaten the same way as typical American table grapes. Holding one grape with its “belly button” (what I call the part where the fruit attaches to the vine) to your mouth, you gently suck while pinching the fruit with your fingers. The green jellylike flesh pops out of its thick skin and into your mouth. Grapes that are consumed this way are called slipskin because of how readily the flesh falls from its casing. After pulling each grape out, we’d work with our teeth to extract and spit out the large seeds, then return to the skin to suck out any extra grape juice. We’d repeat this until we were left with lightly purple fingertips and a mound of skins and seeds.

Recently, my boyfriend’s parents showed us around their magnificent garden in Staten Island. They had footlong gourds, fig trees, a wall of tomato plants, and, to my shock, Korean grapes. It turns out these grapes—which account for two-thirds of Korea’s grape production (and are also popular in Japan)—are not Korean at all but American. A hybrid of the iconic Concord grape.

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