Once upon a time, there was an old winemaking family in Australia, whose activity in the wine business stretched back into the late 1800s. Its modern patriarch was Jack Mann, whose career as a winemaker in Australia spanned an amazing 51 vintages. Mann passed away in 1989 at the age of 83, and that same year, a wayward vine sprouted in the corner of the family garden. Recognized as a Cabernet because of its distinct leaf structure, the family let it grow. The vine blossomed and bore fruit just like any other Cabernet Sauvignon with only one major difference. The grapes were white and stayed that way. Whereas most red grape varietals grow green and then turn their particular shade of purple or blue during veraison, this little vine turned a golden yellow, as if it were trying to be a Chardonnay.
When the vine became old enough to bear fruit capable of making wine, the Mann family, as any curious winemakers would, made wine from it — at first in secret, and then, having propagated the vine with cuttings, publicly at a winery named Port Robe.
Flash forward ten years and this White Cabernet has recently been recognized as a new grape varietal called Cabernet Cygne Blanc and will be sold outside of Australia for the first time, as a number of bottles are heading to the UK (not much, though, as the 2005 production was around 67 cases, though 2006 will be around 1000 as more vines come online)
Now a wine release in the UK normally wouldn’t rate as news here on Vinography, as most of my readers are here in the states with me and have no hope of getting their hands on this wine. However, I was struck by this story because it is clearly evidence of just how we got to the place we are now, where we’ve got something like ten thousand different vine varieties in the world.
Many are the result of deliberate, semi-deliberate, or accidental cross breeding by us humans throughout the last 10,000 years but some are clearly the result of biological accident — random mutation, recessive genes, whatever. Whenever I think of the evolution of grape varieties I tend to think in much longer time scales and tend to forget that sometimes, things change overnight.
For those (like me) that are curious, the only tasting note I could find for this wine was “rich, with hints of herbaceous character and it is generous in flavor with a long satisfying palate.”