Dureza is a dark-skinned French wine grape variety from the Ardeche area of southern France in the Rhone-Alpes region. Historically Dureza was used for producing red wines, but today is hardly grown and is not part of the list of the allowed grape varieties of any French AOP wine, though it can be produced under some IGP wines.

There were only 11 hectares planted to Dureza in the late 1970s: by 1988 only one hectare remained. However since the variety's relationship to Syrah was revealed, interest in Dureza has been increasing with new plantings of the grape in the Saint-Joseph AOC in the northern Rhone Valley.

The Dureza grape is most widely recognized today for being a parent vine of Syrah. As at some point the Dureza vine spread eastward towards the Drome and Isere regions, for it was here that the variety likely came in contact with the Savoie wine grape Mondeuse Blanche where the two varieties created a natural crossing that became the international variety Syrah.

DNA mapping has also revealed some relationship to the Italian wine grape variety Lagrein grown in the Trentino-Alto Adige/Sudtirol region of northeast Italy, though the exact relationship is unclear. Dureza is known as a vigorous vine, capable of producing high yields, though the variety tends to ripen late in the season - which may explain its name: Dureza which is connected to the root of the Latin term 'serus', meaning 'late'.

The parentage however, does not reveal how old the grape variety is - though in the year AD 77, Pliny the Elder wrote about the wines of Vienne (which today would be called Cote-Rotie), where the Allobroges made famous and prized wine from a dark-skinned grape variety that had not existed some 50 years earlier. 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 the vines of Allobrogica were resistant to cold, which is not the case for Syrah.