‘Terroirists’ are in the genes

The scenes might have been scripted in Hollywood. It’s rural France, it’s July, it’s 2007. In the dead of the night, a shadowy group of dissident wine producers take a TV journalist to a remote location to witness a video message being made.
In the video, seven wine makers, their faces hidden by black balaclavas, declare that ‘blood will flow’ if the French president does not act soon to raise the price of wine. The group is deathly in earnest. Several local supermarkets selling foreign wines are attacked with explosives, public buildings are bricked up and graffiti-ed with the wine terrorists’ initials. The group shoots at and hijacks lorries bringing wine from abroad. The upset of few becomes the revolt of many.

h4. Aggresive competition
Fearing for their blood-thirstiness, scientists in a Paris suburb work around the clock in an attempt to innovate their way out of this trouble – they work on mapping the genetic sequence of a world-famous grape, the pinot noir.
You see, for the past seven years, the French wine industry has been suffering from overproduction, a sharp drop in consumption and aggressive competition from the New World. French wines were overtaken on the global market in 2003. In short, the country’s once-bounteous vineyards are unable to compete any more and the gold has turned to lead.
h4. Mapping genetics
What the recent scientific breakthrough means is that, armed with the right attitude, the French may able to innovate their way out of this trouble. Since the mapping of the pinot noirs genome, the money in wine circles is on genetically modified or transgenic wine.
On December 18 2007, the first full genetic sequence of any fruit, the pinot noir grape, was published in the Public Library of Science. In doing this, Riccardo Velasco of the Agricultural Institute of San Michele al’Adige in Italy and his team paved the way for genetically modified or ‘transgenic’ wines.
The pinot noir grape has 30,000 genes in its DNA. That is more then the human genome, which contains 20,000 to 25,000 genes. The grape also has an unusually high number of genes that encode enzymes that produce flavourings and aromatic compounds – more than 100 of its genes are dedicated to producing tannins and terrenes. The grape produces some of the world’s finest wines and also contributes to some blends of champagne. Soon it may do so much more.
The mapping of the grape’s genome opens the possibility for certain ‘foreign’ genes to be spliced straight into it. Take ‘flavour genes’, for example. Coffee, plum, duck and blackberry could be introduced into the grape’s genome, thus dictating the flavour of the fruit and the wine it would go on to produce.
h4. Swirl sniff and spit
For the first time ever, flavour could be guaranteed. Genomics could even beget entirely new and novel flavours. All the highbrow swirling, sniffing, spitting and consumer uncertainty could become a thing of the past. Another area on which it could have an impact could be medicating habits – boosting wine’s beneficial ingredients and even introducing a few new ones.
For example, genomics could allow consistent amounts of genes that encode the enzymes that produce resveratrol, quercitin and ellagic acid to be included into our wine – improving our tickers while we sip. Other ‘splice and dice’ jobs could include introducing the gene for acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), caffeine, sildenafil (Viagra) and some types of antidepressants into the grape’s genome. That is four wine-induced maladies banished by the bottle – the public house could become the new pharmacy.
On a more prosaic level, it is also likely that down the line, this research will be used to create hardier grape varieties.
Grapes could be developed with resistance to bacterial infections such as Pierce’s disease, fungal infections such as mildews and viral infections such as corky bark and fan leaf virus, which turns leafs yellow and kills the flowers before they can form fruit and is present in as many as a third of France’s troubled vineyards.
h4. Sexy science
The rise and fall of the French vineyard is a story as old as the world, but the mapping of the world’s first fruit genome is more than just sexy science – it’s groundbreaking. It is likely to take years to apply this new knowledge to today’s wines, however, and new flavours (if they are introduced) may be so subtle as to require a very sophisticated palate to appreciate them.
French winemakers need to confront transgenic wines, by embracing them. Whether this will be enough to appease the ‘terroiristes’, as the public house gears up to replace the pharmacy, is another matter.