Hybrid grapes provide delicious option amid climate change

If you were offered a glass of Baco Noir or a crisp Seyval Blanc with your dinner, would you know what was being poured?

An estimated 20% of wine grapes in North America are hybrids, traditionally French-American hybrids. The remaining 80% are vitis vinifera — Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, etc.

When colonizers arrived on the East Coast of what would become the United States, they brought vinifera cuttings from Europe. Those transplants failed, felled by mildew and pests. There was an effort to make wine using the hardier native grapes, such as Norton in Virginia, but the results often were unappealing and musky.

Then in the late 1800s, French growers and winemakers — struggling with the catastrophic infestation of phylloxera, the louse introduced unwittingly via vines imported from the U.S. — experimented with grafting vinifera to robust American rootstock. They created a host of French-American hybrid varieties, which became popular in the American Midwest where vinifera grapes did not thrive.

Read the rest of the article at Great Northwest Wine.