In other cases, we are drinking almost the exact same wine as Roman emperors—our pinot noir and syrah grapes are "siblings" of the Roman varieties.
The researchers' findings demonstrate just how enduring wine consumers' tastes can be, and how careful winemakers have been in preserving popular and enduring varietals, according to Nathan Wales, a study co-author and lecturer at the University of York specializing in paleogenomics (the study of ancient DNA).
"When we imagined people 1,000 years ago drinking wine ... the question was ... how different was the stuff in that bottle? Now we've got the answer," says Wales. "It's incredibly likely that someone 1,000 years ago was drinking something that's pretty much genetically identical to what we drink today."
But wait. Living things evolve, right? Not domesticated wine grapes — we've hijacked natural selection to serve our own tastes for thousands of years. It works like this: Instead of letting grapes pollinate each other and go through sexual reproduction, most winemakers essentially clone their plants through a process called "vegetative propagation." This can either involve inserting dormant buds into existing roots, or taking a vine shoot from a mother plant and planting it directly in the earth. The new vine remains genetically identical to its "parent," with all the ineffable qualities that make it produce merlots and pinot grigios.
Zoë Migicovsky, a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University in Canada specializing in apple and grape genetics who was not involved in the study, calls the research "fascinating."
"[These grapevines have] been around for hundreds and hundreds of years, but everything around [them] has continued to change," she says.
But, she says, the research also reveals a deep vulnerability in wine cultivation — our own obsession with pedigree and timelessness.
As the environment changes around these wine varietals, they remain the same — genetically frozen in the past. This renders them susceptible to ever-evolving pests, pathogens and extreme weather. "If these varietals are genetically identical all over the world ... it means they're all susceptible to the same pests and diseases as well," Migicovsky says. "We [will] need to use more chemicals and sprays in growing [them]" as threats advance.
A big part of Migicovsky's research involves the resilience of wine — how to breed sturdier grapes, ones that can withstand the environmental changes we're going through now as a result of climate change. Warming temperatures may increase the strength of certain pests and pathogens. And extreme weather events will hit the wine industry hard, she says. For instance, just recently in her home province in Nova Scotia, Canada, a frost "devastated" the wine industry. "We're going to see more and more of that now," she says.
But this doesn't mean all wines are doomed. "There is a lot of diversity in grapevines," Migicovsky says. "We can breed varieties that are more tolerant and resistant for our current environment." It's mostly a brand name thing: The same forces that have kept pinots nearly identical for 2,000 years are making winemakers vulnerable, clinging to ancient lineages like old aristocrats. Tastes can change and evolve, and new grapes could display a magnificent array of tastes and textures to rival the ones we have now, Migicovsky believes. To keep the wine industry alive, she says it may be up to winemakers and consumers to let go of the savagnins, the pinots, the merlots — and embrace a hardier set of grapes that will survive to titillate and inebriate future generations.
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