The World’s Most-Planted Wine Grape Still Carries Signals From the 1600s
If you’ve ever opened a bottle of cabernet sauvignon and wondered why it tastes so consistently like itself, the answer may be stranger than expected: the grape remembers. According to a new study in Genome Biology, every cabernet vine growing today still carries molecular memories of its original parents from 400 years ago — chemical signatures so persistent that they’ve survived centuries of climate swings and cloning.
“It shows that even after centuries, cabernet sauvignon still holds the molecular memory of where it came from,” said Professor Dario Cantù, of the University of California Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology, in a press release.
Looking at Gene Memory in Cabernet
Cabernet sauvignon traces back to a single 17th-century cross between cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc — a pairing that went on to become the world’s most-planted wine grape. Unlike many crops that are continually re-bred, grapevines are propagated from cuttings rather than seeds, meaning modern cabernet vines are nearly genetic replicas of that original plant.
That unusual stability has long raised an important question: even if DNA stays almost the same across centuries, does the molecular layer that helps regulate gene activity stay the same too? These chemical signals can shift as a plant responds to stress or changing environments, but some can also stick around. Whether any of those signals could persist through hundreds of years of clonal propagation was unclear.
“These are modifications that don’t alter the genetic code itself, but sit on top of it,” Cantù said. “They can be inherited from your parents, but also change as you develop, as you interact with the environment or as you’re challenged by stress or disease.”
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Comparing Cabernet to Its Parent Grapes
To see whether cabernet sauvignon carries long-term molecular memories from its parent grapes, the research team built detailed genetic maps. They assembled high-resolution genomes for cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, and sauvignon blanc, then sequenced multiple clones of each to capture small differences that develop as vines age and spread.
An advance came from a new framework called a phased sequence graph. Instead of relying on a single reference genome, it lets the researchers trace which stretches of DNA came from each parent and how those regions are regulated today.
With those maps, the team compared how each region of the genome was chemically marked in the modern vines versus their parents. Across much of the genome, they found a strong resemblance: more than 96 percent of regions shared among the three varieties carried the same chemical state. The similarity suggests cabernet hasn’t just inherited its DNA — it has also carried forward a stable layer of regulatory information through centuries of cloning and environmental change.
“It’s like sequencing identical twins at 90 and still detecting the parental signatures they inherited, even though their experiences — and much of their epigenome — has changed with age,” Cantù said in the press release.
Next Steps for Wine Grapes and Other Crops
The results don’t just explain cabernet’s history; they point to stress-related epigenetic marks that could help breed more resilient vines without changing their DNA.
“If we know which stress-induced epigenetic changes persist, we could potentially introduce them by exposing plants to specific conditions and select vines that retain those beneficial marks over the long term — without altering their genetic makeup and preserving the defining traits of varieties like cabernet sauvignon,” Cantù said.
The same genomic framework could be applied far beyond wine grapes, offering a new way to identify durable molecular markers in other perennial crops.
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