GMO AND GRAFTING GRAPE VINES
This scary new world of hybridization, grafted grapevine hybrids, and GMOs is barely a generation or two old. With major concerns about what is unfolding the terms need thoughtful redefining. In the United States eighty percent of the food we eat on a daily basis contains one or more types of GMOs, yet GMO foods have been on the market only since 1994!
This genetic transformation of our diets in the shortest possible time is now replacing our native diets developed over tens of thousands of years; the same with wine. Only two decades, but the results are already in. GMO foods are killing us.
The grafted vine hybrids are a viticultural and wine quality failure and have resulted in mass-produced wines that require chemical manipulation on a major scale to be acceptable.
Before GM vine hybrids took over, the finest wine was created using a species of grape vines known as Vitis Vinifera. Planting and caring for them had continuity for thousands of years. Archeological evidence suggests that Vitis Vinifera grape vines in some form existed as far back as the Paleocene and Eocene epochs of the Tertiary period, thirty-eight to sixty-five million years ago. By the end of the Tertiary period (1.8 million years ago), numerous species within the genus Vitis were distributed throughout the Americas and Eurasia.
The point to this in regards to wine is that when we plant Cabernet Sauvignon or any varietal on its own root we have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years of genetic tradition. When we plant grafted hybrids of different species, more often than not, we have a few decades of confused genetic information.