Wild Things

In the last couple of months, a number of articles cropped up related to climate change and what it means for us as farmers and eaters. It’s as if, as more extreme and erratic weather swirls around us, the conversation is intensifying about how we might have to change, too.

In July, climate observer David Wallace-Wells opens an essay in The New York Times titled, “Food as You Know It Is About to Change,” talking about disruption in the global food supply, citing rising food prices and hunger, and declining yields around the world. “But disruption is only half the story,” he says. “Adaptation and innovation will transform the global food supply, too… Climate-endangered foodstuffs will be replaced or redesigned. Diets will shift, and with them the farmland currently producing (them). The pressure on the present food system is not a sign that it will necessarily fail, only that it must change.”

Replaced or redesigned food? What does that mean? In many cases (and certainly in the case of grapes), it means a return to or reliance on lesser-known or indigenous varieties. Chef Marcus Samuelsson wrote just a few days ago about cooking with the little-known grains of Africa. “As climate change threatens the availability of global staples like wheat, rice and potatoes, we must diversify what’s on the plate,” he says. “Chefs have a role to play in putting these climate-friendly foods on the map. Demystifying a lesser-known ingredient is something we do all the time.”

The same could be said of winemakers. Indeed, of the 10,000 or so varieties of grapes in the world, only a handful—Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and a few others—make up the lion’s share of global wine production. In projects like dear native grapes, and Hudon Valley Heritage, both in New York, heirloom or native grapes like Concord (typically used for juice and jelly), Delaware (a Hudson Valley-bred variety from the 19th century once widely planted across the US) and Aestivalis (a little-known North American native grape species) are being cultivated as quality, environmentally sustainable wines.

(As I also learned this month, bananas are in the same boat as grapes, if not worse. It is the world’s most consumed fruit. Yet a single variety, the Cavendish, accounts for almost half of all bananas grown globally. There are only about 1,600 known banana varieties; their DNA is stored in a gene bank in Belgium.)

And in labs around the world, the genes of Vitis aestivalis and other native grapes are sequenced and cataloged for use in creating new climate-ready grapes and improving the ones the world already knows and loves. As Samuel Peters, a farmer and agricultural researcher at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, explained in another article that recently crossed my desk, these “crop wild relatives” can have “many high-impact traits that could be studied and adapted to improve domesticated crops.”

Using the example of how grafting Vitis vinifera vines onto Vitis riparia rootstocks saved the French wine industry from phylloxera, Samuel explains that cultivated crops (like vinifera grapes) are selected and bred for a narrow set of traits, potentially making them vulnerable to pests, diseases and changing environmental conditions. “Crop wild relatives didn’t go down the same evolutionary trajectory” as cultivated crops, he writes. “They remained in the wild, subject to natural selection.” Thus, these wild things could hold keys to sustaining agriculture, and grape and wine production, into a chaotic future.

As Hurricane Helene—the strongest hurricane to make landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region—unleashed record flooding through the Southeast last week and the West Coast copes with the ravages of wildfire, the effects of climate change are upon us. The question is, how and what will we change to adapt?

Donnell Brown
President

This column appeared in the September 2024 NGRA newsletter, published September 30, 2024