Northern Grapes Project

I came across this when I typed 'North Texas October Grape Project' into my browser's URL field.  It looks like something I need to review carefully. 

Northern Grapes Project

 "Our vision is to develop grape production, winemaking, and marketing practices suited to the unique characteristics of these V. riparia-based cultivars marketed through retail tasting rooms and their niche in the U.S. wine market..."

Reviewing response to the record breaking late frosts

Frost tolerance this spring was surprising. Some vines ignored frost, others were lost all their flowers and/or fruit to frost. Here is a recap (click to enlarge). The data is in roughly chronological order. The blue lines represent  frosty mornings.

To summarize, it looks like the local wild varieties have adaptations that maintain fruit production despite a late frost, even a record breaking late frost like those we suffered through in 2013.  I've been told April 15 is the last possible frost date, and we had 2 after April 15.  The French-American crosses have no coping adaptations, and none produced any fruit.  The North American bred vines, Extra and Lenoir were in between.

Grape purity

Like anything else 'grape', purity and hybrid are in the eye of the beholder.  As far as I can tell from the academic papers I've seen, vitis has a lot of regional gene pools that exchange DNA continuously with neighboring regions.  From this perspective, 'Hybrids of other species' doesn't mean much unless you are saying people want to cross non-reproductive organisms such as a grape x peach cross.

DNA flow between somewhat stable regional gene pools seems a better model than 'species'.  Pure and 'hybrid' don't seem workable metrics.

This brings me to the notion of 'regional wine,' something that reflects the regional vitis gene pool. For my own purposes, 'regional wine' is something associated with a region's non-commercial winemakers, the salt-of-the-earth wine makers (anyone who doesn't make wine for a board of directors on a different coast). The real road block to a regional wine is not grapes, but our choices about what to focus upon.  As such, the project of determining 'the taste' of 'Central Texas wine' by breeding a 90% Central Texas cinerea with perfect flowers, 25+ brix and an October harvest may seem an implausible long term plan, but an unstoppable one, too.

Bridlegate x op cluster discovered

The last two months have been devoted to getting the irrigation system up, and keeping seedlings, cuttings and transplants alive.  We are making progress, but nothing is done. I'm keeping things alive, though.

It is so hot during the day, I end up having two work sessions.  One in the morning, and one after dark, wearing a headlamp. So, at midnight, I am rushing to finish line testing and replacing drippers that are not working.

Something caught my eye. It looked a bit like a caterpillar, which I'm always watching for.  On closer inspection, it was a cluster I'd never seen before!  It is the first Bridlegate x OP to produce a cluster.

First impressions don't mean much, but the berries are very small.  It might be a cultivated wild cinerea female.  Bridlegate is a cultivated wild cinerea, and the pollen parent was probably a wild male cinerea.  If so, it will be the 4th cultivated wild cinerea in my vineyard, and the first to set a cluster.  I'm looking forward to making some wild cinerea wine and trying to find out what it wants to be.