Moving on, a couple of months ago I wrote about Slowfood's campaign in defense of whole, raw milk cheeses (the FDA is thinking about banning them). Now, it appears, the EEU is quietly legalizing transgenic vines for use in wine making. The idea, say the bureaucrats, is to help European vines maintain their authenticity in the face of the international wine trade, which also means international trade of vines. How a genetically modified (GM) plant can be more authentic than the one from which it came is beyond me.

What I suspect may be happening is that someone wants to shortcut the natural selection process used to crossbreed varietals to obtain specific characteristics (aromatic or color compound content, for example), or to obtain resistance to certain pests, the most logical of which would probably be the phylloxera bug. For those who don't know much about wines, phylloxera are North American relatives of aphids that selected North American grape vines (Concord-type grapes, I think) as their preferred source of food. When Europeans took American vines home with the idea of growing them to make wine in the late 1800s, they inadvertently brought the phylloxera bug too and unleashed a catastrophe: It spread to European vines, which had no resistance to it, attacked their roots, and did almost all of them in. With them of course went the vineyards, and the wine production of France, Italy, and just about everywhere else. Indeed, we'd probably have no more wine had someone not thought of growing American rootstocks, which are resistant to the bug, and grafting the European vines onto them. Now, almost all of the world's vines are grafted onto American rootstocks.

Why would one want to change this? Quality might be an answer, but I don't think so, because I have tasted a Dolcetto that was made from vines grown with their native roots, and it wasn't noticeably better or different than the other Dolcetti I tasted with it. Cost cutting might be an answer -- there are hundreds of millions of grafted vines out there, and if one were to eliminate the grafting there would be considerable savings.

Or would there be? For producers of plonk who don't care what their grapes are like so long as they contain enough sugar to be fermentable into wine, yes. However, quality producers wouldn't be interested in a generic phylloxera-resistant vine for two reasons. First, the resistant strain of Cabernet, Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, Chardonnay or whatever might not be the one that's best suited for their land. Second, the strain's rootstock might not be suited for the land. There are now dozens of rootstocks, each carefully tailored for specific soil conditions, for example rocky and well drained, sandy, clayey and rather moist, dry calcareous, and so on. A careful producer aiming for top quality will select a rootstock for each vineyard, or even plant different rootstocks in different parts of a vineyard if conditions differ, say a steep slope that flattens out or a change in the soil. And then select the strain of the varietal (e.g. Cabernet) that will do best in that spot; this means that in a single vineyard there can have several different rootstocks, and also several strains of the varietal. There's no way to achieve this with a generic, genetically engineered plant. One therefore wonders, what's the point? To favor those who make jug wines?

The second strange thing about this new regulation is that it doesn't require those who use GM grapes to say so on their labels. Considering that European food producers are required to say if their products are genetically modified, and that Europeans as a whole have emphatically said they do not want genetically modified foods, this slippery silence is disturbing. If you'd like to know more, contact Valter Musso or Alessandra Abbona of the Slow Food Press Office, phone +39 0172 419615 or 419666, fax +39 0172 421293, v.musso@slowfood.it, s.abbona@slowfood.it.

A presto,
Kyle Phillips
Webweaver, About Italian Cuisine

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