Does Queens have Terroir?

That's Queens, the New York borough. The climate might actually be okay--the other end of Long Island actually makes some decent wines.

Queens's Napa Valley (Wall Street Journal)

Weed control by guinea pig?

Although I feel at least as fond of grapes as any fruit (they were the first fruit I studied), I must confess that most articles on wine kind of bore me, as they have a tendency to just rehash the same ideas about the same small set of varieties, while I would much rather focus on new varieties, or just drinking the wine.

Most of this is true about this article, however the image of eleven million guinea pigs patrolling a vineyard, along with a race of dwarf sheep, made me like it anyway:

Sauvignon strategies, some involving sheep (Financial Times)

New grape rootstocks from the University of California

Five new rootstocks from Andy Walker's breeding program at UC-Davis (cleverly named GRN-1 through 5):

New nematode resistant rootstocks for 2008 (Western Farm Press)

I was particularly pleased to see that GRN-1 is a hybrid of bunch grape and muscadine. Despite lots of talk about Euvitis/Muscadinia hybrids, there really haven't been many releases (I can only think of this and 'Southern Home', as well as maybe a few germplasm releases).

I don't know nearly as much about grape rootstock breeding as I do about the above ground part, but I always enjoy seeing how much wild material is used, and the completely different selection of species they're dealing with: V. champinii, rufotomentosa, monticola, rotundifolia, rupestris, and berlandieri, just in these five releases. Some of these (especially the first three) rarely if ever occur in the pedigrees of fruiting vines.

Variegated Grape Seedling

Just thought I'd pass along an interesting image gallery from an acquaintance of mine, Cliff Ambers (you may recall Cliff and his wife Rebecca from an earlier post on the Norton grape). Cliff runs a pretty impressive amateur grape breeding program as well as a small farm winery in Virginia.

Cliff took a bunch of pollen from a selection of the wild grape species Vitis cordifolia (Cliff seems to be one of this species' champions) and irradiated it with X-rays, then used it to pollinate flowers of 'Chardonel', a hybrid white wine grape. Among the resulting seedlings was this variegated one, though it seems to be out-growing the variegation with time.

Variegated Grapevine (Clifford Ambers)

Variegation or even complete loss of chlorophyll is not uncommon as a result of mutagens, nor is out-growing that variegation. The cells that lack chlorophyll are generally out-competed by the few that do, so there's a tendency for them to be supplanted by their normal brethren. There's also a strong tendency for heavily variegated plants to die outright, since not having chlorophyll turns out to be a pretty bad thing in general for plants (Cliff grafted this one onto another vine, which is probably why it survived what was an almost complete loss of chlorophyll).

Update: Cliff has given me permission to actually post some of his pictures here, so I thought I'd save you all the terrible effort of clicking the link. Here are a few of the images (there are bigger images, and a few more, on the site):

Early leaves of the grafted vine with high level of variegation (actually near-albinism)



Seedling from which variegated scion was taken.

Both images (c)2008 Clifford Ambers and used with permission

Update 2: Since I seem to be posting with insane frequency lately, I decided to put one of these images as the "Image of the Day" (or week or month or however long it turns out...that 'Pixie' grapevine picture lasted close to a year, I think) so that such a cool picture was not pushed off the bottom and lost in the mists of the internet past almost immediately...

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Muscat Love

I have a general policy here of not letting an article by David Karp slip by without linking to it if I can help it. Frequently he'll drop me a line when they come out, or I'll catch them in the New York Times, but sometimes, like this one, one will slip past me... (and yes, I know there's an apricot one out there too...I still need to sit down and read the darn thing).

New Grapes Abound With Old World Flavor

(New York Times)

As I think I may have mentioned in the past, it was the incredible diversity of flavor (and color and shape, too, but mostly flavor) in grapes that really hooked me on fruit breeding and led me into the career I wound up in. It does my heart good to think that a little bit of that diversity is sneaking into supermarkets. Muscat tends to be a love it or hate it prospect--but I'm definitely in the former camp.

And 'Jupiter' is a darn good grape...I'd love to find some locally here.

(There's a grapes RSS feed from the New York Times, too, by the way, in addition to the fruit one I mentioned earlier).

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Ed Swanson article

I mentioned the contributions of "amateur" grape breeders back in the "Crops Not to Breed" post, so I thought I'd pass this along:

Hardiness x Appeal (Wines & Vines)

Ed Swanson is an amateur grape breeder in Nebraska. It wasn't that long ago that quality production was pretty much an impossibility in the coldest parts of the country (sure, you could baby along some of the hardier viniferas, but only by going to elaborate lengths and great costs), but thanks to men like Elmer Swenson and now Ed Swanson, cold climate viticulturists have a few more options.

Crops Not to Breed

This link came across a mailing list that I'm on the other day (I actually tried to post this one from Mexico too, but my phone doesn't appear to do cut and paste, and I wasn't able to stomach typing in the whole link). It's part of a larger work, on breeding for disease resistance, Return to Resistance, which merits at least a closer glance by any of you breeding types out there, but this is the chapter that got me (and the mailing list) riled up:

Chapter 28. Crops Best Avoided By Breeding Clubs (International Development Research Centre)

I like the idea of "breeding clubs" formed by amateurs, and I do agree with some of the things selected to be on the list. Even the cleverest amateur is not going to make much headway breeding bananas, or garlic, or turmeric without specialized facilities and supplies. Seeing as how it's next to impossible to even get viable seeds of these things, I'm not sure it would even occur to many people to try. But some things on the list really surprised me. Especially grapes.

Grapes, in my mind, are actually fairly well-suited to breeding by amateurs. They readily form seeds, they are fairly easy to cross, easily propagated, and can produce widely segregating viable hybrids with relative ease. Many amateur grape breeders have been important to the development of the crop: T.V. Munson, Hermann Jaeger, Elmer Swenson, for example. Even the great French breeders who gave us the widely grown French hybrids (Couderc, Seibel, Seyve, etc.) were not trained breeders.

The argument against grape breeding has always been tied to the importance attached to variety in marketing grapes. This is only a factor, however, when one can grow the traditional varieties. Thanks to amateur breeders, viticulture has made a push into the most extreme regions, and as regional production becomes popular, a "local" varietal may well (and in some cases already has) become a selling point, not a liability.

Grapes Gone Wild

This link came across a mailing list that I'm on today:

Valiant Vineyards: South Dakota's first winery finding international acclaim (Prairie Business Magazine)

I have kind of mixed feelings about this idea. On one hand, I really like the idea of making use of the species native to your region, of fruit harvested from the wild. On the other hand, I've actually had Valiant Vineyard's wild grape wine, and it tastes like, well, what you'd expect wild Vitis riparia wine to taste like. Which is pretty unpleasant. It's acidic and weird, and reminds me of many of the riparia hybrids I tasted when I worked in grape breeding (although 'Frontenac', which is half wild riparia, can produce a pretty quality wine). That's just my opinion, though, and people with much more sophisticated tastes in wine than me obviously think differently.

(I do think the port might work really well, though...)

It reminds me of the 'Munson' wine I had in Arkansas. 'Munson', better known as Jaeger 70, is a hybrid of two wild vines, V. lincecumii and V. rupestris. And much like the South Dakota wine, they charge an arm and a leg for it. And much like the South Dakota wild grape wine, it tastes like wild grapes, which is to say, not particularly good, at least in the classical wine sense. (Though I will confess to a certain fondness for some wines from American grapes, many of which are only a generation or two from wildV. labrusca).

Although I don't particularly want to drink the wine, I do have a healthy appreciation of Jaeger 70, though--it's in the pedigree of virtually all French hybrid grapes, and, through these, many recent hybrids as well.

And since I'm already sort of free associating here, I might as well mention the story of Herman Jaeger. Jaeger was a Swiss immigrant who settled in Missouri in the 1860's. In addition to setting up a vineyard and winery, Jaeger also bred grapes, and was instrumental in saving the French wine industry from the phylloxera disaster in the 1870s, for which he was awarded the French Legion of Honor. ('Munson' was named for T.V. Munson, his friend and fellow grape breeder). And, in an interesting final twist, in 1895, at only 51, he walked out of his home, saying he was headed for Joplin, and was never seen again. He left behind a note instructing his family not to look for him. No one knows what became of him.

Fruit Genetics Friday #4: Transposable Elements and Fruit Color

After I wrote that big long 'Micah Rood' post, I felt a powerful hankering to spend a little time getting back to some down-and-dirty molecular stuff. This is surprising because when I finished my Ph.D. I thought I'd never, ever feel the urge to even look at molecular genetics again. (I actually do occasionally venture over to the molecular side of things in the course of my job, but it's really mostly some one else's job, which is exactly how I like molecular biology to work). But I figure that it's been a long, long time since I wrote a big dense genetics post here (heck, it's been a long, long time since I wrote much of anything here), and if I'm going to even pretend to have this "Fruit Genetics Friday" thing I'm going to have to have something to post some Friday, so I might as well give it a shot. For those of my readers who are intensely non-science and are here merely out of simple love of eating and/or growing fruit, my apologies. Though really, at this stage, you ought to just be pleased to see me posting at all.

Anyway, if you recall (if you don't, feel free to look at it now), back in the discussion of the 'Micah Rood' apple, I mentioned transposable elements as a possible cause of a sudden shift in coloration. Whole books and whole careers have been spent on transposable elements, and I'm hardly an expert, so I'm not going to attempt to burden you with an in-depth discussion of the many types and the different mechanisms involved. The short version is this: Transposable elements are basically freeloaders, little chunks of DNA with the power to move themselves around the genome. Exactly when and why they do this is not always very well understood. Usually they can do this relatively harmlessly--a lot of most higher organisms' genomes are comprised of "junk" DNA (though not of much of it seems to be junk as we once thought). As long as they land somewhere unimportant in the genome, they're pretty harmless. If they land in the middle of a gene, though, they will often disable the gene. If the gene was something important, one may see a pretty stunning change. If the transposable element later "jumps" out of the gene, it may or may not return to normal--frequently the gene won't get repaired correctly, leaving a small "scar" in the sequence at the point from which the transposable element departed. Most genomes are chock-full of transposable elements (by some estimates half of human DNA), but relatively few of them are active, because as they accumulate mutations themselves, the lose the ability to jump. Because particular sequences seem to be especially attractive targets for specific transposons, some species have specific traits that seem particularly prone mutation due to transposon insertion.

Fruit color changes in grape are relatively common (in the sense that lots are known, not that you would likely ever encounter one in your lifetime). Probably the best known are 'Pinot gris' and 'Pinot blanc', both mutations of the venerable 'Pinot noir' variety. (The difference between the two is that 'Pinot gris' is a chimera (like 'Pinot Meunier'), carrying the mutant color gene only in one cell layer, while 'Pinot blanc' has it in all layers). 'Frontenac gris' is a white mutant of 'Frontenac', a relatively recent wine grape release from the University of Minnesota. Both of these cases involve black fruited varieties producing white fruit, but the process can go the other way as well. 'Verdelho roxo', 'Ruby Okuyama' and 'Flame Muscat', are red mutants of the white grapes 'Verdelho', 'Italia' and 'Muscat of Alexandria', respectively. Occasionally the mutant forms of these will revert back to the original color.

The causes of many of these mutations are unknown, but it seems that most white fruited grapes result of a transposable element called Gret1 (Grape retroelement 1). This transposable element is of a type called a retroelement (because it copies itself through an RNA intermediary phase, much like retroviruses, to which they are likely related). Gret1 has a tendency to land next to a gene called VvMybA1. While the gene's function isn't entirely clear, it's part of a class of genes called transcription factors, which regulate the expression of other genes. While Gret1 doesn't actually disrupt the gene itself, it does land in the promoter region and thus may affect the expression of the gene.

It turns out that in nearly all white grapes, both copies of VvMybA1 (one each from the male and female parents) have a copy of Gret1 in their promoters, while black fruited varieties have one or more copy without this insert. Recent red fruited mutants of white varieties appear to have lost one copy of Gret1, apparently leaving an additional bit of genetic detritus behind, partially disrupting the promoter. It's theorized that the white fruit characteristic developed in Vitis vinifera, the European grapevine, only once.

Interestingly (to me anyway), while white-fruited selections of other grape species lack the Gret1-VvMybA1, it does appear that at least a couple may have developed white fruit as the result of Gret1 insertions elsewhere. Both 'Pixiola' (a white fruited selection of V. aestivalis) and 'Bougher' (a white V. riparia) feature Gret1 insertions in the gene F3H. F3H is involved in anthocyanin production, and coincidentally, F3H appears to also be the source of the yellow fruit mutation in the diploid strawberry, Fragaria vesca.

(For you really hardcore genetics types, you can see the relevant papers here, here, and here. (And a bonus strawberry paper here.))

A few more links, while I'm at it

Just a collection of interesting fruit news links:

Stinkless Durian: Fans claim this takes the fun out of it, and I suspect it would. I also wonder what it does to the flavor, considering the significant link between aroma and taste? I'd be curious to learn the genetics of durian stink, too.

Bruce Mowrey: Another fruit breeder profile in the mainstream press (too bad they spell the name wrong). Bruce actually now heads the whole breeding department at Driscoll's, so he's not just in charge of strawberries.

Pierce's Disease Resistant Grapes: This is probably deserves a more complete write-up, given the fact that the glassy-winged sharpshooter (the vector for the disease) was recently found in Napa. That could be a very bad thing, though I'd bet it would have to be really, really bad before they started planting hybrid grapes.

Rutgers Blueberry Breeding: A little blurb on the Rutgers blueberry breeding program. The comment about blueberries needing to be blue reminded me of Paul Lyrene's pink blueberry, 'Florida Rose'. A cool idea, even if it hasn't caught on.

Indian Mangoes Finally Arrive: Coming soon to a table near you, through the wonder of irradiation!

Grape breeder Bob Zehnder Dies

I just got word via the grape breeders list that Bob Zehnder has died.

Zehnder was the last of "the three Bobs", the others being Robert Farrer and Robert Dunstan, "hobby breeders" who pushed the limits of southern grape breeding and left behind a rich legacy of promising, yet surprisingly little known, germplasm. He conducted his work in Summerville, SC, under perhaps the highest conceivable disease pressure. He was perhaps among the last of the old generation of passionate amateurs in this field, though the baton has been passed to quite a capable field of both amateurs and professionals.

He was also a genuinely nice guy--generous, friendly, and kind. The field of grape breeding and the world in general are richer for having had him in it.

Cliff Ambers visited Bob a few years ago, and put together this page.

Floridagrapes.com has a list of his selections, which gives you an idea of the extent of his contribution.

(Sorry there haven't been much in the way of updates around here lately. I'm very, very busy. I promise I'll pick up the pace in a few months when I'm over this hump and back on my feet again.)

Outlaws of Viticulture

In a fit of horticultural xenophobia seven decades ago, the French, followed by much of Western Europe, decided that they could not trust the free market and people's tastes to choose the best grape cultivars. American cultivars, mostly introduced during the phylloxera crisis of the late 1800's, were now forbidden. Minor vinifera cultivars were strictly controlled. Geographic areas were limited to their own specific selections of the great vinifera wine cultivars. To me it seems crazy, to them I guess it seemed like preserving national treasure. The government ordered the offending vines torn out, and European viticulture was permanently frozen in an idealized state. Or at least that was the idea.

Defying the law, brave bands of rogue viticulturists persisted in their cultivation of the forbidden cultivars. Varieties like 'Jacquez' (also known as 'LeNoir' or 'Blue French'), an old V. aestivalis hybrid from the American South known for its disease resistance, 'Isabella', one of the oldest American cultivars, as well as V. riparia x V. labrusca hybrids like 'Noah' and 'Clinton'.

Now, with emergence of Eastern European viticulture on the European scene, these brave few see a potential ally in their quest to free European viticulture from these shackles.

Winemakers protect outlawed vines: the grapes of wrath (International Herald Tribune)

(This article is a few years old, but I just found it and believe the issue still exists)

'Pixie': a new grape for genetic studies

The USDA Agricultural Research Service as has just released a new grape specifically for genetic studies. It's called 'Pixie' and it's easily one of the oddest looking grapevines you've ever seen. It's a tiny, stunted little thing, with the internodes close together, short petioles, and miniature clusters of grapes. It also fruits continuously.

So it takes care of a couple of the big problems with trying to do studies in grapes. First, grapevines are big. To get any reasonable number of replications in a study you soon have to start working outside, which has the disadvantage of making it much more difficult to control your variables, prevent the escape of transgenes, etc. Also, it's outside. Growing them indoors takes big pots and lots of greenhouse space, which ain't cheap. Second, working with most perennial crops usually means that if you're interested in what's going on with fruit or flowers (and you frequently are) you are limited to one shot a year. 'Pixie' takes care of both of these problems. In fact, its developer Peter Cousins claims you can grow it in a coffee cup and get it to fruit. I know Peter, and I'm pretty sure he would not lie about this.

Another cool aspect of 'Pixie' is that aside from the fact that there's clearly something a little different going on, 99%+ of its genes are essentially 'Pinot noir'. The dwarf cultivar was created by culturing the outer layer of cells of 'Pinot Meunier' into an entire vine. Turns out that 'Pinot Meunier' is essentially 'Pinot noir', but the outer layer of cells has this mutation. (In other words, it's a chimera.) It's not really visible on 'Pinot Meunier', because the inside cells are normal, although the growth is somewhat reduced and there's an odd dusty hairiness to the underside of the leaves.

Similar mutations have occurred before. I remember a number of dwarf seedlings in a population at Cornell, for example. In fact, we tried one of them as a rootstock to see if it might impart any of its dwarfness onto its scion (it didn't). I brought a vine home and the cat chewed all the buds off of it. Stupid cat.

Anyhow, check out the press release:
New Dwarf May Be Giant of Grape Research (USDA-ARS)

One more step towards the "New Eastern Viticulture"

I've mentioned Clifford Ambers before in connection with his research on the origins of Norton, but I thought I'd mention some of his other efforts, as he's just put out a ton of new data. In addition to his historical research, he's also a grape breeder, working towards what he calls the "New Eastern Viticulture", utilizing selections of the local wild grapes and old cultivars to create cultivars that are actually adapted to the humid weather and temperature extremes of eastern North America. It's an exciting idea, and one I've been keeping tabs on for a couple of years now.

He's got a bunch of information up on his website, including lists of crosses (lots of them this year!), and now his "virtual vineyard" with vineyard data and descriptions with photos of nearly everything in the vineyard! Even if you're not interested in what he's working on (though I can't imagine why you wouldn't be), it's a nice source of data and photos of some not especially common cultivars.

History of European Grape Cultivars

I've written previously about the background of 'Norton'/'Cynthiana', one of the most venerable American wine grape varieties. But even the oldest of American cultivars is young compared to the great cultivars of Europe, many of which are many hundreds of years old. The origins of such grapes are even murkier, originating in an era before even the faintest inklings of genetics, before most of the people involved were even literate.

Carole Meredith, working at the University of California at Davis, has spent many years trying to deduce the history of these varieties through genetic testing. She's deduced parentages of many cultivars, but her most widely publicized discovery was that 'Chardonnay' was in fact a seedling of 'Pinot noir' and 'Gouais blanc', a nearly forgotten white cultivar of mediocre quality.

The link below is to an article from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, describing her work to date (it's from 2003):

Science as a Window Into Wine History
(American Academy of Arts and Sciences)

'Autumn King', a new seedless table grape

The USDA breeding program in California has announced the release of a new seedless white table grape:

New Seedless Grape Developed (PA Farm News)

I don't know much about it, but it looks good.

'Eudora' Muscadine

The USDA station at Poplarville, Mississippi has released a new purple muscadine cultivar, named 'Eudora' after Eudora Welty (although Eudora to me will always be an e-mail client). I'm not entirely sure, but I think this may be the first cultivar out of this program, though in way it's really just a continuation of the old University of Florida grape breeding program run for years by J.A. Mortenson. When that program was discontinued, many of the vines were propagated to Poplarville, where the program was continued first by Creighton Gupton and now Steve Stringer. (Strangely, very little went to the grape breeding program at Florida A&M University, which was beginning around the same time.)

Although the barriers to grape culture in the South remain considerable, muscadines do well and really have a lot of potential...the really issue is creating a market. I think progress is being made on this front. We had two varieties at the grocery store up the road last time I was there, and I think this year is the first that I've routinely seen muscadines at that store.

Anyway, I haven't had much luck finding information on 'Eudora', just this page. If I find anything else interesting, I'll post it.

Another Version of the 'Norton' Story...

Norton, America's True Grape (theWineMan.com)

This is another variant on the 'Norton' story, and though I disagree with it on a few points, and the Ambers' research has turned up many of the facts the author claims are unknown, it touches on other aspects of the story, and is an interesting read itself.

A History of the 'Norton' Grape

I feel like I've been a little grape heavy these days, and I've mostly just been passing along recycled links from mailing lists, but oh well.

The Norton Grape - An American Original (via American Wine Society Journal)

I came across a reference to this link on the grape breeders mailing list. For those unfamiliar with 'Norton', it's a fairly old American wine grape, of rather unclear origins (though it's fairly obvious on casual inspection that it has a fair proportion of Vitis aestivalis in it). It is one of the few American grapes of its era that can make a world-class wine (by "normal" standards...there are of course those like my wife who think the very best wine possible is a sweet labrusca, and their view is every bit as valid), and there's been a resurgence of interest in it, particularly in places like Missouri and Virginia.

The Ambers' article thoroughly explores the origins of this grape and the life of its discover, Dr. Daniel Norborne Norton. I have my own theories on its pedigrees, but at this stage its hard to really know.

One thing I'd like to learn more on, which the article only touches on slightly, is the origins of 'Cynthiana'. Isozyme assays have shown 'Cynthiana' and 'Norton' to be identical, but there are those who swear they can taste the difference, and there's some evidence to indicate slightly different ripening times. I've seen the two and I can't see any difference, but I haven't seen them side by side. I can't taste any difference in the wine. Cynthiana appeared in the midwest, and its origins are at least as mysterious as 'Norton'.

Cliff Ambers does his own grape breeding, heavily relying on eastern American wild grapes, and has been rather vocal about his ideas of a "new American viticulture" (You can read about his work at the website for his vineyard, Chateau Z).

Florida Grape Finds Success in Texas

Patrick Pierquet on the grape breeders list passed along this article on 'Blanc du Bois':

Texas winemakers find success in award-winning wine made from UF’s hardy grape (U of F press release)

'Blanc du Bois' does indeed make a darn fine wine...I've sampled it both from Lakeridge Winery and experimental batches made by the Florida A&M University breeding program. (Which, incidentally, is quite a nice program. It's relatively new, so I hadn't heard much, but I had the pleasure of visiting early this year, and I was quite impressed.) I've got a vine of it in my yard, and while it grows just fine, the thing is a disease and insect magnet. It may be Pierce's Disease resistant, which is a major plus, but it sure isn't resistant to most things. Still, most other things can be kept in check with chemicals, while Pierce's disease is a pretty serious barrier to southern viticulture.

Note: I'm not 100% sure, and I don't have access to my notes on the subject where I am at the moment, but I'm pretty certain they have the pedigree wrong. There is no muscadine in 'Blanc du Bois'. (There is, however, another Florida hybrid with muscadine and bunch grapes in its background, that being 'Southern Home').