Growing Sauvignon

Increasing variants to reduce risk

NEW ZEALAND has 6,000 new variants of Sauvignon Blanc, thanks to a programme tapping into plants’ ability to immediately adapt to danger. “Plants have the natural ability to become more genetically diverse in response to environmental stress,” says Dr Darrell Lizamore, who is principal scientist in the Bragato Research Institute (BRI) Grapevine Improvement Programme. “This knowledge was used to produce a population of vines with unique traits.”

The programme, which is a collaboration with BRI’s research partners, aims to produce 12,000 diverse variants of Sauvignon Blanc to help New Zealand’s $2 billion wine industry become more resilient to a changing climate. New Zealand has 26,559 hectares of Sauvignon Blanc vines and due to the way grapes are propagated, the vast majority of these vines are genetically the same, says Darrell. That means that any new pest, disease or environmental change that affects one vine could affect them all. “Since this doesn’t involve crossings with other vines, the plants are still Sauvignon Blanc, and the new variants are fully formed at the first generation,” he says.

The 6,000 plantlets already produced by BRI and Plant & Food Research are now in a nursery and will be planted in a research vineyard in Spring. Meanwhile, the BRI team is working to rapidly understand how each variant is different, using the first high-throughput third-generation sequencer in New Zealand. The ‘PromethION’ sequencer, supplied by Oxford Nanopore technologies, generates long-read data that is critical for understanding genetic differences among grapevines, as well as the impact that a vine’s environment has on its genetic traits.

By comparing the DNA of different vines using sequencing approaches, the vines can be screened to identify those that exhibit useful traits to help the New Zealand wine industry adapt to a changing climate, says Darrell. “Useful traits such as improved yield, resistance to disease, frost tolerance and water use efficiency will be selected whilst maintaining the iconic Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc flavour profile.”