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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

Everybody would want to have a piece of that taste, as the existing vines today in Europe were all cross-bread with american vines after the mid 19th century due to the "phylloxera pleague". So there is no way to reconstruct the "original taste" as we use different vine strains today and the original vines are extinct.

When steamboats arose, the shortened travel times resulted in the insects being involuntarily brought to Europe alive where it devasted vine harvests. As a remedy, European viners cross-bread their vines with American vines to obtain resistance. Further read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_French_Wine_Blight

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They weren't cross-bred initially. (theres only a few hybrids) They were grafted (and most still are!) to the roots of American vines. The part of the plant the bears the fruit should be similar to the way it once was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting#French_Wine_Pandemic

https://grapes.extension.org/grafting-grape-vines/

That is amazing, didn't know about the grafting. Seems crazy to create this kind of hybrids, especially considering how long this is done by humans. But I still think it will be hard to come by original vines from the roman age, as man tends to cross-breed or select all the time.

An extreme instance of grafting, 40 kinds of fruit from a single tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_40_Fruit

This article does not support your claim. It says European viners grafted their vines to the roots of American vines. Grafting is not cross breeding. I don't know much about the wine industry, maybe they also did cross breeding as well, but that wikipedia article doesn't mention anything like that.

Do we still have the DNA of the original vine strand?

DNA wasn't known during the time of the roman empire (and a long time after that). Today we have seed banks built into permafrost close to the polar circle [0] for exactly that purpose (to store seeds for future generations) - the importance of which I only realized after hearing about sylphium [1] (an herb that was also extinct by the romans but was used as valuable medicine back then - its properties or studies might even benefit our modern society as its reported effects are still a mystery today).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

To add to this: Don't forget that all of our seeds today are the result of centuries of man-made breeding and selection processes. Mankind did selection and cultivation to achieve wanted properties (higher yields, resilience against plagues/insects, taste properties etc.) and todays strands of seeds are the result of this breeding - the value cannot be stressed enough. Best example is the grapefruit, a fruit that did not exist before the 18th century at which point it was the result of a cross-breed between an orange and a pomelo strain. It was deemed tasty, and that is the only reason why we still have it today.

Disease resistance and environment adaptation is why we need to continue to produce and collect seed as locally as possible.

Another common plant that wouldn't exist without human intervention is what we know as strawberries. The garden strawberry is a cross of a North American and a Chilean Fragaria species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry

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