A toast to the remarkable new ‘Piwi’ grape varieties

Tesco Finest Floreal, France 2023 (£8, Tesco ) I’m not sure I’d have written about Tesco’s latest wine if it wasn’t for the story behind it. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a perfectly decent light dry white, at a fair price, with gentle melon, greengage and gooseberry flavours – a wine that inhabits a happy halfway house between the liveliness of sauvignon and the fleshier fruitiness of a southern French chardonnay. It’s not the most exciting white of this price around, even in the Tesco range. But what makes it noteworthy is the grape variety, floreal, which is one of a few recently bred hybrid varieties created by crossing European Vitis vinifera grape varieties with wild Asian and American vines. Known as Piwi (short for the German Pilzwiderstandsfähige Traubensorten), they’ve been bred to resist fungal diseases. That means they require far fewer fungicide sprays, which, says Tesco, leads to an ‘80-90% reduction in the need for vine treatments, significantly lowering tractor usage, CO2 emissions, and soil compacting.’

Breaky Bottom Seyval Blanc Cuvée Grace Nichols, East Sussex, England 2017 (£35.99, Waitrose ) It’s still early days for the Piwis, with Tesco’s the first to make it into a major UK retailer. But they are being taken increasingly seriously in a wine business that is becoming more conscious of its own contributions to a climate crisis that threatens its very existence. Wines made from varieties such as cabernet blanc, solaris, souvignier gris, muscaris and regent will become much more familiar in the coming years. We’re also seeing a reappraisal of hybrids such as the white seyval blanc, which was widely planted by English growers in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to its cold-hardiness. Long dismissed as second rate, winemakers such as Blackbook and Breaky Bottom have proved seyval can make some distinctive and genuinely fine sparkling wines.

Le Professeur Marselan, IGP Pays d’Oc, France 2023 (£9.49, House of Townend )
With more and more producers now working with Piwis and other hybrids, it seems likely they’ll follow the same path to acceptance taken by the many familiar ‘intraspecies’ crossings of two Vitis vinifera varieties created by vine breeders over the past century. Recent wines I’ve enjoyed from some widely planted crosses include M’Hudi Pinotage, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2020 (£17.50, Wine Society ), a wonderfully rich, mellow-berried red take on pinotage, the 1920s Cape crossing of cinsault and pinot noir which aimed to bring the former’s robust productivity to the fussy, hard-to-grow pinot; and Le Professeur Marselan, a sumptuous ripe black-fruited southern French red from the marselan variety that was bred in France in the early 1960s from grenache and cabernet sauvignon.

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