Call it what you will, it can make a very good wine, probably the best native American wine grape. We're at the upper end of the area in which Nortons apparently can be grown, so when we ordered 5 vines 4 years ago from the
St. Francois vineyards in Missouri, I was uncertain as to whether or not we would have success. This grape requires a long growing season.
Well, they're growing just beautifully. They have been slow to develop as vines, and a couple are still on the smaller side but all have produced beautiful, tight clusters of virtually disease-free grapes. So far, the birds are mostly staying off them but I'm going to monitor them closely. I did a sampling from all vines this morning, beating out the predicted high of 97 or better here on the first day of September, and got a reading of 14.8, which I thought was pretty good.
We're going to be gone for about a week in about a week, so a bit of a dilemma as to whether or not chance that the grapes will still be there when we get back or if I'll have to pick right before we leave and freeze the must. I'll do the latter if necessary, since I hate to lose this good first crop.
Call it what you wish, but "a study done at Florida A&M has narrowed down the parentage. Parker, Bordollo, and Colova published a paper in Acta Horticulturae in 2009 that states, based on DNA analysis, that V. aestivalis, V. labrusca, and V. vinifera are all involved in the parentage of Norton. The vinifera cultivar is ‘Chasselas’. The researchers also discovered that PD resistance is derived from V. aestivalis. ........They also found that Norton and Cynthiana are genetically identical, ergo, they are the same cultivar. ~ Dr. Eric Staphne, OK State Univ., Dec 1, 2010. There are today 246 Norton wineries in 23 states. Have you read Todd Kliman's book, The Wild Vine? A Norton documentary that reads like a novel.
ReplyDeleteThanks, TNWT. I had read that both v. aestivalis and v. labrusca were involved, but not v. vinifera. By PD, do you mean powdery mildew? I'll try to check out the paper from A&M, as well as the book by Kliman. I'm anxious to see how this wine turns out!
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