Buying Moon Drops
While hunting for the free cheese samples at Whole Foods on 27 Sep 2015, I chanced upon Moon Drops, which transfix the eye since they are grapes with a bizarre cylindrical shape. Below are pictures from the Internet.
I felt like it was a Fruit Explorer obligation to buy some Moon Drops, but I did blanch at the price of $4.99/pound. Usually I refuse to pay more than $1.99/pound for grapes, and only rarely that much. I picked over the display to locate the smallest bag and found that it weighed 1.36 pounds, which meant that it cost $6.79.
A curiosity of these grapes is that the PLU code of 3094 is printed on the bag (see picture several paragraphs below), but when I looked up this number on the PLU site, it told me that this number is "retailer assigned" (see picture below). How can it be retailer assigned if it is printed on the bag?
Another curiosity is that the receipt (see picture below) says that these are muscadine (rhymes with "fine") grapes, which is not the case since muscadines are round and bigger than normal grapes (see picture below). Perhaps this error is related to a retailer-assigned PLU code being printed on the bag. While we are on muscadines, which are native to the southeastern U.S., here is an interesting distinction between a wet scar and a dry scar from a Clemson site.
When muscadines are harvested, or when they mature and fall from the vines, the stem separates from the fruit. As it separates, the skin of the fruit may tear causing what is called a wet scar on the fruit, or it may separate with little or no damage to the skin and is called a dry scar. With a wet scar, this tearing of the muscadine skin can allow for the entrance of mold, so these commercially grown fruits are processed quickly into jams, jellies, juice or wine. The dry scar cultivars are commercially grown for sale as fresh market berries for fresh consumption. They will keep longer without spoilage due to the dry scar.
Breeding and Propagating Seedless Grapes
Moon Drops are a grape cultivar grown only by a California company called the Grapery (and its licensees in other countries). A 28 Aug 2015 interview with Jack Pandol, owner of the Grapery, reveals that this company's strategy is sharply focused on developing new types of grapes with unusual shapes and flavors, e.g., cotton candy grapes. He hired a Ph.D. grape geneticist who plays the role of mad scientist by furiously creating new varieties of grapes; he uses the traditional method of taking pollen from one variety of grape and brushing it on the flower of another variety, but he also takes the embryo from a seedless grape and grows it in a petri dish. For a discussion of grape breeding, see the first five minutes of the interview with Jack Pandol. Much of this interview features the hosts raving about the over-the-rainbow taste of the Grapery's grapes. (I capitalize Moon Drops since it is a trademarked name. Trademarked names we have encountered previously are the Ugli, a variety of uniq (28 Jan 2015) and the Tuscan melon, a variety of muskmelon (1 Aug 2015).)
If you are wondering why you have never heard of Moon Drops, it's because they are hot off the press. They were first marketed in 2014, along with witch fingers grapes (see picture below, and also see the video of Kathie Lee exclaiming over them), and it was decided that this variety was different enough to merit its own name. An on-line naming contest were held, and out of the 893 submitted names, "Moon Drops" was chosen.
Let's applaud the Grapery for focusing their plant breeding efforts on flavor. We are all aware of tomatoes and so many other fruits and vegetables that have been bred for yield, size, visual appeal, disease resistance, shelf life, shippability, and other traits to the detriment of flavor. For an example of the prevalent mindset that the Grapery is battling against, Presilla [p. 56] quotes one of the scientists most active in cacao breeding as saying, "Flavor is not a major objective right now," and summarizes current cacao breeding efforts:
The majority thinking is that at least for now, the problems faced by cacao farmers are too pressing to divert attention from goals like productivity and disease resistance. The specter of fungus-born plagues and catastrophic shortages is intensely present to all observers.
All seedless grapes, including Moon Drops, have embryos, or incipient seeds; because of a genetic error, however, no hard seed coat results. Therefore, you don't notice the embryo when you eat the grape, and there is no seed suitable for growing a new vine. So how are seedless grapes propagated? The three methods are grafting, cuttings, and layering. (For details, see this site.) Grafting and its terminology was discussed in the e-mails of 1 Feb 2015 for apricots and 27 Mar 2015 for citrus, and the same principles apply to grapes. Below is a picture of a grafted grape vine, where you can see that the rootstock has been chopped off to remove the canopy, and the scion is coming out of the side of the upright rootstock. If you want to try some grafting, perhaps by stealing a Moon Drops twig and grafting it onto one of the wild grapevines around Boston, you can find a guide to grafting at this site. To use cuttings, snip a twig from the desired grape plant, dip it in rooting hormone, put it in the ground, and water it. Layering means that you bend the vine over so it touches the ground, fix it in place, and let it develop its own root system and become a complete new vine.
Speaking generally, the history of seedless grapes is as follows. In the beginning was the seeded grape. At some time in the past there was a mutation that prevented a grape from having a seed. Someone noticed this and had the foresight to preserve that mutation by propagating that variety of grape vegetatively. (Propagating vegetatively means that the plant is reproduced without a seed, e.g., the three methods of grafting, cuttings, and layering discussed above; there are other methods, one of which you will read about in a future e-mail on ginger.) Since seedless grapes must be propagated vegetatively, all of the seedless grapes sold in stores are clones, just as all navel oranges sold in stores are clones (27 Mar 2015).
The e-mail of 27 Mar 2015 mentioned that one of the drawbacks of heavy use of clones is that the crop, lacking genetic diversity, is susceptible to disease; we have already seen examples of bananas (fungal disease, 27 Mar 2015), chocolate (witch's broom, 16 May 2015), and coffee (coffee rust, 18 July 2015). Another famous example is the Great French Wine Blight of the mid-19th century. An aphid called a phylloxera was inadvertently carried from America to Europe, where it devastated the French vineyards; one estimate is that French wine production fell by more that fifty percent between the late 1850s and the mid-1870s. Desperate French vintners resorted to practices such as burying toads under their vines to draw out the poison. The French wine industry was eventually saved by importing American rootstocks, which were resistant to phylloxera, and grafting French scions onto them. The phylloxera has a complicated life cycle with as many as 18 stages; this insect goes through from four to seven cycles in a year. Pictures below show phylloxera on a grape root, a sketch of its life cycle, and an 1890 cartoon from Punch..
We can expect more epidemics as time passes. For example, in 2014 an epidemic of esca, a fungal disease also called black measles, had infected 13 percent of the French wine grape crop. The only known treatment for this disease, is sodium arsenite, which is banned since it is carcinogenic. A UC Davis information page on esca has a section titled "Management," and it is blank. It is feared that climate change will lead to an increased frequency of epidemics, according to Dr. Andy Walker, professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis, whose work focuses on maintaining the health of viticulture.
Eating Moon Drops
Here are pictures of my Moon Drops.
- The bag.
- The bunch that constituted almost all of the grapes in the bag.
- Simulation of this bunch handing on a vine.
- Since a Moon Drop is a highly unusual size and shape for a grape, I will provide six pictures that give the scale by comparing Moon Drops to:
- A silver dollar.
- A ruler.
- An AA battery.
- My hand.
- My pinky.
- A baby carrot.
An unusual feature of Moon Drops is that printed on the bag is a testimonial from the owner of the company that produces them. (You can perhaps make it out in the first picture in this e-mail and in the picture above of the bag, though you won't be able to read it. This same testimonial appears in French on the other side of the bag.)
Discover flavor that is out of this world. Moon Drops' one-of-a-kind shape suggests an equally unique taste experience. One heavenly taste and you'll agree, these Moon Drops are ... stellar.--/signed/ Jack Pandol, 3rd generation CA grape grower, jackpandol@grapery.biz.
With this endorsement ringing in my ears, I popped a Moon Drop into my mouth. It was indistinguishable from a high quality, standard, seedless, sweet grape in both taste and texture. What a disappointment. Don't get me wrong; it's good, but most grapes are good.
The verdict is that there is no way that Moon Drops, though visually arresting, are worth the stratospheric price that is charged for them (subject to the usual small sample disclaimer). It is hard to justify Moon Drops unless you are entertaining the Queen.
Party Tip
Your party tip is to serve Moon Drops to your guests and challenge them to figure out what they are without eating them. Before serving, remove the Moon Drops from the stem so that it is not a giveaway. Be amused as your guests make guesses: mutant baby carrot, chewing gum (when I was a child, there was a red chewing gum called "hot dogs" that had this shape), processed rabbit's foot, whistle (except for color it looks much like the Oscar Mayer wiener whistle I had as a child), egg of a giant insect, dehydrated glass of wine, a pill for a horse, a missile designed expressly for a slingshot, a bead to be used to make chunky jewelry, a party favor to be cracked open to reveal the prize inside, or a grain of rice produced by agribusiness. Once you have exhausted the inventiveness of your guests, allow them to eat their Moon Drops, and watch their faces light up with recognition as they realize that they have just been introduced to one of the wonders of modern plant breeding.
Rick
P.S. Monet had his haystacks, and I have my PLU stickers. At the top of this post is the latest Fruit Explorer art work, Sticker Shock VI. It covers stickers accumulated from 13 Jul to 1 Oct 2015. It took me just over a year to produce the first six pieces in this series.
References
Presilla, Maricel E., The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes, revised, Ten Speed Press, 2009. For a description of this book, see the e-mail of 16 May 2015.
