A Walk on Wine’s Wild Side

What would wine from wild vines taste like? Give any answer you like: you’ll probably be right.

The reason you’ll be right is that every wild vine is different, and will therefore make different wine. So you could say “spicy, dark”, and nobody could argue. You could say “just dreadful”, and that would be right, too, of a different vine. It’s one of the reasons we have so many different grape varieties now: the gene pool is pretty big.

What are wild vines? The are the ancestors of the vines we know, and they are genetically different. They’re not just vines that have escaped and made their own way in the world, like feral cats: the vinous equivalent of feral cats would be what the French call “vignes ensauvagées”, vines that have returned to wild habits, like climbing trees and producing berries more for seeds than for juice. They may look wild, but they’re not really. Sorry, Tiddles.

Wild vines can be found all over the world. Those vines that the early colonists in North America turned into wine; they were wild vines. The vines that produced the very first wine drunk by mankind, probably somewhere in the Fertile Crescent many thousands of years ago, they were wild vines. But different wild vines. The American species are Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia and a few others. East Asia has Vitis amurensis wild vines. But here we’ll concentrate on Vitis vinifera silvestris, the wild European wine vine, which is the ancestor of Vitis vinifera sativa, the cultivated European wine vine.

Being cultivated is not a question of better manners and an appreciation of ballet. In wild vines, some plants are male and some are female. But vines mutate a lot – you might even find a single branch, or a single cluster of grapes, that is different from the rest of the vine. So now and again you’’d get a wild vine that was hermaphrodite. If, 8000 years ago or thereabouts, you had ambitions to cultivate vines, that is the one you would focus on, because you would need fewer plants to get a crop. Eventually, as one generation of vines followed another, you would have plants that were visibly and genetically different to their ancestors – in the same way that dogs, after a just few generations, began to look different to wolves.

At this point, to take things further, I have to summon the expertise of Nadine Raymond and Olivier Yobregat. Nadine is an ampelographer who works at the co-operative at Plaimont, in southwest France, which is so fascinated by the wealth of old and wild vines in its region that it has a project of hunting them down, testing their DNA and trying to fit them into the genetic jigsaw that is the European wine vine family tree. Olivier is an ampelographer at France’s Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin Sud-Ouest.  I went out into Plaimont’s vineyards with them a couple of years ago, and we looked at vines which were certainly not wild, but which were not hermaphrodite either. “Very c”ose to a wild vine” was their description of these vines with female clusters and a lot of millerandage. Female vines are never as fertile as hermaphrodite vines, they say – another reason why those early farmers would have valued the difference.

Different strokes

And it’s not just in being male and female that wild vines are different. “The berries of the same bunch do not all ripen at the same time,” Nadine says. “Their cycle can be shifted, so that there are flowers receptive to pollen over a longer period than if everything was at the same stage.” Obviously, if you fancied your skills as an early winemaker, this would be a nuisance; if a mutation in this department popped up, you’d grab it.

© Gustavo Gerdel
| Rano Kau volcano on Easter Island is home to a mysterious collection of grapevines.

All wild vines are different. Different from each other; that is: every vine seed will produce a vine that is different to its parents. Every pip in a Cabernet Sauvignon grape will, if you plant it, grow into a totally new variety. That’s true of wild vines, too. No two are alike. What’s more, says Nadine, all the wild vines they find in their area are old, because young seedlings get downy mildew and die. Only the old ones are tough enough to survive, partly because their foliage is up at tree-canopy level, since trees are what they climb up, and it’s less humid up there. Wild vines are rarer and rarer.

But what I really want Nadine to explain is how you define a wild vine and how you define a cultivated one. If it happens over several generations, that implies that the change is gradual, even though at some point it is categorized differently.

It is a gradual process, she confirms. You’d get the odd mutation in the wild population, and hermaphrodite vines would be selected; then there would be another, and another, and gradually colors, berry size, vigour, upright shoots and other familiar characteristics would emerge, a bit here and a bit there, selected by growers because they seemed an improvement. How long did it take? How long is a piece of string? “The general scheme is wild vines, then primitive varieties (sometimes female), then old varieties and then modern varieties,” she says, “But this is not a linear continuum.”

And the thing is, it all happened a very long time ago, so reconstructing how it happened is complicated. Nadine says that Plaimont’s DNA research into reconstructing the ancestry of today’s vines can take us back to the Middle Ages, but before that, it’s pretty much a blank. And the evolution of vines from wild to cultivated is not an ongoing process because for thousands of years now people have had all the cultivated vine varieties they needed; there is simply no need to go back to wild vines and hope for a helpful mutation to kick things off.

Wild vines have particular genetic markers that ampelographers look for, and, says Nadine, “most cultivated varieties do not have obvious relationships with wild populations because the domestication events are so far away in time that the characters are diluted by many successive crossings”. Some varieties, which are firmly Vitis vinifera sativa, may nonetheless share some genetic markers with Vitis vinifera silvestris. In those cases, says Nadine, a wild vine must have snuck into the family tree more recently – rather like Tiddles having a night out on the town, with consequences.

How then should we define the vines that have been discovered growing in the crater of the Rano Kau volcano on Easter Island? They certainly weren’t planted there; photographs of the site show a lake surrounded by impossibly steep dry slopes of scree and grass. Winemaker Fernando Almeida Olla, who is one of a trio who have got together to take cuttings, is having their DNA analyzed, but doesn’t have any results yet. Could vine seeds have been carried to the island by birds? The nearest land is Chile, he says, “and Santiago de Chile is four hours away by plane”.

Are there other vines on the island? Yes, people plant them in their gardens, but for shade more than for fruit. “People have tried to plant vines for wine there on a small scale, but it has never been successful so far; I don’t know why,” he says. He thinks the vines they’ve found are Vitis vinifera, going by the shape of the leaves, and suggests they might be growing where they are – which requires a four-hour trek there and a four-hour trek back – because they’re inaccessible to the sheep and goats that graze the island. “They have deep roots, and maybe they’ve been there a long time: one hundred, two hundred years?” At the moment it’s all questions and ideas, but no answers, until the DNA analyses come back.

Four hundred cuttings have been planted in Chile, and Fernando and his colleagues will start the long, long process of evaluating the results. This is something that Plaimont hasn’t done with its wild vines, not least because the tiny and sparse berries of wild vines mean that you’d need an awful lot of vines to make a test. But Olivier has vinified some wine from wild vines. It was, he reports, dark in color, very tannic, astringent and acid.

It makes you wonder why anyone ever persevered.