“Grapes on the Vine” is a song written by Steve Gillette and Charles John Quarto. By Gillette’s account, it began as a poem by Quarto that he set to music in the early 1980s, when the two first started collaborating — a literary origin that shows in the song’s image-rich, reflective lyric.
The song first reached a wide audience through country music, when Waylon Jennings recorded it in the late 1980s. Its blend of a contemporary songwriter’s craft with a plain, rootsy melody made it well suited to acoustic interpretation, and it crossed quickly into bluegrass.
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