Reply for Todd on Indigenous Vines

Hello Todd!

Hey! It works! The media is SO full of hyperbole these days I
even use it to get my point across sometimes!! Hyperbole CAN help a
cause if it is used with humor and tongue-in-cheek language. It can
be dangerous when used seriously with the intent to harm. I suppose
the only folks my rant might tarnish are the Eastern vinifera
vineyard owners, but I suspect they are too well insulated from hybrid
grapes to care. I am anti-vinifera, but only because it is so poorly
suited to Eastern growing conditions. I can tolerate the wines from
it.

I am serious that anyone with enough space to grow a vine can
breed grapes. A shovel and a rake are exactly what Ephraim Bull had
at hand when he created Concord - the most influential grape in
Eastern history. If you want to make the grape to replace the market
position of Cabernet Sauvignon you'll likely never do it, but if you
want good grapes you made yourself anyone can do it. If this is being
disingenuous to anyone it is the experts of 'grape variety control' at
the big breeding programs who have great vested career interest in
making their varieties the only ones available to growers. The last
thing they want are grape growers getting it in their heads to make
their OWN varieties from their local grapes (like it was in the late
1800's). The growers easily could, but imagine the losses to sales of
the latest hot new grapes from "X Breeding Program"!

Yes, I grant you that calling vinifera an invasive species is
hyperbole, but it got you to read it and think about it!! The media
is rife with this mechanism these days. It IS cheezy. But, then, I
find the boring, vinous plonk being made from these grapes and sold
across the East as "interesting, delicious, exciting, and worth our
high price" equally cheezy. They really are not worth the fungicides
sprayed on them, in my opinion.

It is also true that the Regional Wine Week's usage of "local"
did not mean "indigenous", but my vision of regional wine, food and
culture is one where the unique identity of those things springs from
a place and stays there. Wine in America very much follows on the
coat tails of fast food. Customers have even developed a canned
notion of what the experience of "going to a winery" should be! They
also expect to find their familiar store vinifera names on the
bottles. You can blow the smoke of terroir all you want, but this is
not regional flavor.

It has long been said by breeders of disease- and pest-resistant
grapes that the only thing we really need from vinifera is the
self-fertility trait since they offer so little else to a vine that is
resilient in the Eastern climate. Now, I'll give you that an import
may become a local flavor, but it has to survive in that location on
its own merits because if it has to be babied along it will eventually
die out in the intervals between interested growers. This is what has
happened in France where the old American Clinton and Noah varieties
(labrusca-based!) have survived in local enclaves and become popular
and part of the local culture since their introduction in the 1860's.
Luckily, these vines are incredibly more disease resistant than the
"approved" vinifera and propagate freely from cuttings growing on
their own roots. Yet, they are still not indigenous, and given the
global transportation of disease, Europe will never have an
"indigenous viticulture" because they have no resident wild vines to
build such a viticulture from that could survive without fungcides or
grafting. Eastern North Americans do have such wild vines, however,
and that is my point. They should be worked with, built on,
experimented with, and used for wine to finally find out what they are
capable of.

I've heard the "people hate hybrid/labrusca wine" chant so many
times I had to try selling some of it myself to see. What I find are
people hungry for flavor that have a sweet tooth. They have a hard
time finding satisfaction in industrial vinifera wines and are excited
to try my wines from back crosses with our local wild stocks. They
are shocked on first try but invigorated by the idea that the wine is
at least half from local wild vines. They live here. These are their
local wild stocks. They want to experience wines from them and come
back for more. I'll give you a simple definition of an "indigenous"
wine variety as having half or more of its genetic makeup from local
wild stocks and that is capable of being grown from a dormant cutting
without grafting and able to survive intervals of disinterest without
care (i.e. no spray). This is arbitrary, granted, but there is no
definition out there to use. Note that this definition allows a
variety to be indigenous at the county, state, national and
continental levels, but not every variety indigenous to the US or
Virginia is indigenous in my county.

Regards, -CA

P.S. Do you have a vineyard? If not, get one and do all the work.
You'll develop a whole new view on these things.