Grape expectations

I'm glad the Today newspaper now includes in its weekend edition a pullout section with some of the week's New York Times articles.

One such article, by Nicholas Wade, this week (5 Feb) especially caught my eye, from the catchy headline to the tantalising intro and on to the rest of the story.

"Headline: For sex-starved grapes, an incestuous family tree
Intro: 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."

Intrigued?

The article goes on to to say that Dr Sean Myles, a geneticist at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, had developed a gene chip that tests for the genetic variation
commonly found in wine grapes. He then found that 75 per cent of the varieties he scanned were as
closely related as parent and child or brother and sister.

 “Thus merlot is intimately related to cabernet franc, which is a parent
of cabernet sauvignon, whose other parent is sauvignon blanc, the
daughter of traminer, which is also a progenitor of pinot noir, a parent of
chardonnay," the NYT article said.

Wine grape, then, had undergone very little breeding outside a tight-knit circle since it
was first domesticated.

In-breeding in grapes has the same result as that for humans -- the lack of diversity can have negative effects, such as a weakened resistance to disease.

So, for people like me who enjoy wine, the implied advice seems to be: don't be monogamous and stick with my favourite pinot noir. Go for the other varietals as well, and indulge in wines from the Old World, the New World, from anywhere -- even North Korea, if it produces drinkable, non-nuclear-enriched wine! This will encourage wine growers everywhere to experiment and thus try and stop the in-breeding among grapes.

I'll drink to that (in moderation, of course)!