Sunday, July 14, 2013

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment