Maybe Some Barry White Would Help Those Vines?

There is an article in the Science section of the New York Times today about the lack of diversity amongst modern grape varietals (or as the NYT puts it: Lack of Sex Among Grapes Tangles a Family Vine):

For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex. This unnatural abstinence threatens to sap the grape’s genetic health and the future pleasure of millions of oenophiles.

The lack of sex has been discovered by Sean Myles, a geneticist at Cornell University. He developed a gene chip that tests for the genetic variation commonly found in grapes. He then scanned the genomes of the thousand or so grape varieties in the Department of Agriculture’s extensive collection.

The point of the article is that the lack of diversity in the grape family has lead to grapes that are less disease resistant. Not because they are weaker but the diseases have gotten stronger. Something is going to have to be done to make more disease-resistant grapes.

This has already been done with other crops, but wine is different. Most people don't care whether they are eating a Raider, Straight Eight, or Orient Express cucumber but people do care if wine is from a Merlot Grape or a Chardonnay Grape.

Trying to make new grape varietals would involve breeding existing varietals and then convincing people to drink the new varietals, no easy task. An alternative is genetically modifying the grapes to make them more disease resistant, but too many people object to any sort of genetic modification (even though getting the grapes to reproduce is a form of genetic modification).

It is an interesting article and it really harkens back to how long we, as a society, have been cultivating grapes.