RESEARCH
Max potential for microvine
Year-round supply, boutique “super grape” breeding, disease-resistant varieties and sustainable production on a small scale. This is just some of the commercial potential and versatility of a new microvine developed by CSIRO scientists. What began as a project almost 20 years ago looking at French wine grape variety Pinot Meunier now underpins a breeding program which sees the CSIRO scientists creating disease-resistant wine grape varieties. More recently, though, they’ve successfully crossed the microvine with table grape varieties to produce seedless grapes with a range of
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flavours and colours.
So it was named the microvine.
“The project started in the early 2000s with work by two CSIRO scientists, Mark Thomas and Paul Boss,” CSIRO project lead Ian Dry said. “They were aware that the old French variety Pinot Meunier, which is used for champagne production, had a naturally occurring mutation in the layer of cells that cover the plant – this is called the L1 or epidermal layer.
Secondly, the plant flowered very quickly.
“They took Pinot Meunier and they put it through tissue culture, and they were able to to regenerate a grapevine only from cells from the epidermal layer, rather than the entire Pinot Meunier plant.” The team discovered a few interesting things about the L1 plant. Firstly, it had very short internodes which meant it was dwarf in stature.
“Normally if you took a grapevine and grew it from seed, for example, it would take two–three years for it to show flowers, but this flowered as quite a small plant,” Ian said. “So you get flowers from three–four months, and then fruit on it within six months – it had no juvenile period like you find with most woody perennial crops.” Thirdly, every tendril on the vine was floral – instead of just the lower one–two tendrils on each shoot. “As the shoot grew, it just continually produced bunches instead of tendrils! You would get more flowers and more bunches, so if you grow a continuous shoot, you would have a continuous series of bunches,” Ian said.
