Interesting article in FT; perhaps others, especially winemakers already know about this, but much was new to me. (Not sure if it will elude the paywall, but I thought I’d post here in any case.)
Fully behind the paywall.
Going to the article via a Google search worked for me. The first link in the results: phylloxera financial times - Google Suche
This is the best part of the article:
The solution is one the wine world would rather not hear: breeding for disease resistance. “Classic wine grape cultivars . . . have spread throughout the globe,” plant scientist Tim Martinson recently pointed out in Wines & Vines magazine, “but their genetics are frozen in the Middle Ages. This is in stark contrast to other horticultural and agronomic crops. What if fruit breeding had stopped in the 1600s? Peaches would be the size of cherries, watermelons would have six small pockets of red flesh divided by fleshy white tissue, and bananas would have large seeds. Are traditional wine grape varieties — wonderful as they are — impervious to improvement?”
The answer is yes. The genetics of grapes are frozen in the Middle Ages and the closure is frozen in Jacobean times and the distribution in the US is frozen in the Roaring Twenties and if you don’t understand that you shouldn’t be talking about wine.
There are people like Randall Grahm and others who are looking at different grapes that may be less likely to succumb to many of the problems current grapes have. Seems logical.
The problem with diseased stock isn’t limited to grapes either. It’s a problem with many horticultural products, if not agricultural products.
I’m sure that the folks at UC Davis are trying to develop cultivars that are phylloxera resistant. They have ‘succeeded’ in developing Pierce’s Disease resistant cultivars, and folks like Adam Tohlmach are actually growing them in their vineyards. I guess time will tell.
With phylloxera, the way that the soil used to be treated was with methyl bromide - this is no longer legal. It’s tough to deal with it . . .
And talking about PD, there are more and more vineyards in the Sta Rita Hills that are continually being affected by it - I know that Bryan Babcock had to remove some of his vineyard recently due to it . . .
Cheers.
Sorry, Larry,
Maybe I should have emphasized the “New.” The article is not about phylloxera, but rapevine trunk disease (GTD): "dour separate fatal vine diseases: esca, eutypa, botryosphaeria and cylindrocarpon. " Article claims almost 20% of vines are infected with it, and that the current owners of Williams-Seleym had to replant twice, owing to planting infected vines.
As I said, maybe you and many winemakers are familiar with the problem, but it was news to me.
Best,
Josh
Obviously wildly over-stated, but the point is made.
One problem with grape breeding is that the marketing of wine (unlike many agricultural products) is very strongly tied to cultivar name recognition.
Varietal labeling has been tremendously successful, making it very hard to sell wines made from unknown grape varieties.
There are fairly vigorous wine grape breeding programs being carried out in some parts of the world. But these are mostly located in places where signicant obstacles exist to farming classic vinifera varieties. If you can grow CabSauv or PinotNoir competently, you risk a lot to plant hybrids or otherwise genetically manipulated classic wine cultivars (which probably wouldn’t be allowed to carry the cultivar name any longer).