This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: When a glass of red wine arrives at the table, most drinkers make a snap judgment before taking a sip. Is the color deep enough?
Does the hue suggest quality or raise a red flag? For years, that visual scrutiny has posed a challenge to an emerging category of wine grapes. Interspecific hybrid varieties—cultivars bred by crossing multiple Vitis species to withstand disease, cold and the mounting pressures of climate change—have been viewed with skepticism by winemakers and sommeliers who worried that the wines they produce simply don't look the part.
New research from Cornell suggests those concerns may be overblown. A study published Sept. 23 in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture by researchers at Cornell AgriTech and the Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon, France, found that consumers showed no consistent bias against the color of wines made from hybrid grape varieties. When evaluated alongside pinot noirs from Burgundy, Oregon and the Finger Lakes, several hybrid wines ranked among the most visually appealing in the study—and color, regardless of variety, turned out to be a weak predictor of whether drinkers actually enjoyed what was in the glass.
The work is published in the journal American Journal of Enology and Viticulture. "This has been something bugging me for a long time," said Anna Katharine Mansfield, associate professor of enology at Cornell AgriTech in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "Prior to coming to Cornell I worked with breeders at the University of Minnesota and often there was this idea that consumers would reject a wine if its color didn't look very Vitis vinifera-like.
But no one had ever studied that question." The research was also motivated by chemistry, according to co-author and food science doctoral student Catherine Dadmun. "Especially in Europe, there are historic restrictions on the chemical color compounds that appear uniquely in hybrid grapes," Dadmun said. "This has led to the assumption that these compounds must result in low-quality color.
We were trying to clarify what is and isn't important for consumer perception of color quality from a chemical composition standpoint." As winemaking regions across North America and Europe grapple with more erratic weather, late frosts and increasing fungal disease pressure, hybrid cultivars offer a compelling alternative to the European grapes that have dominated fine wine for centuries. Varieties like marquette, Maréchal Foch and St. Croix can be grown with far fewer pesticide applications and survive winters that would devastate conventional vineyards.
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