January 28, 2011--The Sex Life of Grapes

Back in January 2006 I wrote here about how scientific studies provided proof that there were only four women from whom all Ashkenazi Jews descended. To quote myself:

As an Ashkenazi Jew (Jews who descended from communities in Central or Northern Europe), I was not at all surprised to learn from a piece in the New York Times that recent research reveals that at least half of us (4.0 of 8.0 million) are direct descendants of just four women who accompanied their men a few thousand years ago when they left the Middle East for points north and west.

You see, if you, like I, grew up with Aunt Bertha, Aunt Tanna, Aunt Fannie, and Aunt Gussie, you would have known all along that all 8.0 million Ashkenazis actually descended from the four of them. They were that prodigious. Thus it was easy to accept that scientists, using the latest DNA evidence, coming to the same conclusion.

And so when I read the other day that nearly all varieties of wine grapes (75 percent of them) descended from a single father and a single mother grape, I was again not surprised. If we Ashkanazis had just four foremothers, then I didn't doubt that my Pinot Noir, my Chenin Blanc, my Reisling, my Chardonnay, my Merlot, and my Cabernet Sauvignon are all the offspring of the Traminer grape.

But I was very surprised to learn that this was because these grapes, though they produce many of my favorite wines, are so intimately connected because they, well, lacked in other forms of intimacy.

Unlike my ancestor aunts, they were so prone to metaphoric headaches that these grapes didn't get to know each other in what might be called the biblical way.

Plants, you of course know, have sex lives. Though apparently when it comes to grapes, not that much. (In the article linked below, see what the ever-thorough New York Times has to report about all the sordid details.)

The reason for this is that for 8,000 years, winemakers have subverted Nature's ways and taken sex out of the grape-evolution business. Rather than letting romance work its flora magic, they propagated new varieties of grapes by breaking off shoots of existing vines and sticking them in the ground affixed to old rootstock. The result--these cultivated grapes remain so closely related that this reduces the possibility of the natural development of new and stronger varieties.

According to the people who study these matters--one might call them grape sexologists--the purpose of sex is recombination, which is:

The creation of novel genomes by taking some components from the father's and some from the mother's DNA. The new combinations of genes provide variation for evolution to work on, and in partciular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey on them.

I'll remember this as Valentine's Day approaches.

It's all about recombination. I hadn't thought of love and sex in quite that way. But I'll see if Hallmark makes a card that includes recombinational sentiments.