Host: The University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture Fruit Breeding Program recently announced two varieties of muscadine. The new cultivars, Mighty Fine and Altus, offer consumers different uses and farmers a longer growing season. To find out more, Ozarks at Large’s Jack Travis spoke with Margaret Worthington. She's the director of the Agricultural Experiment Station, where these fruits were first grown. She explains that these new products might bolster the fruit's reputation and that even though the fruit is native to Arkansas, most people around here don't know what they are.
Margaret Worthington: “So for those who are not familiar with muscadine grapes, it's like a distant relative of your standard Vitis vinifera grape. They actually belong to a different subgenus, and they have a different base chromosome number. So it's a little bit like a horse and a donkey. Um, muscadines are native to the southeastern U.S., so they're native to Arkansas, anywhere from Oklahoma to Virginia, down to Florida and on the Gulf Coast. So they're native to the Southeast. They're very adapted to this part of the country, very disease resistant, and they are just the world's tastiest grape. I love them; they're my favorite fruit.”
Jack Travis: What makes these new varieties unique?
Margaret Worthington: “Well, one thing that makes them unique is that we are breeding at a site that is kind of in the far northern range of where muscadines can be grown. So muscadines are limited by their cold hardiness for where they can be grown. In areas where you get winter temperatures below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, you can get a lot of vascular injury, where you get the canes killed to the ground, and you have to get like a new trunk built up in the next season. So they get a lot of injury in cold environments. And we are breeding at the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture Fruit Research Station in Clarksville, Arkansas. So we're in the River Valley, in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. And it's a great environment to select for cold hardiness, where muscadines can be grown there commercially. But we do get these cold snaps where we can identify things that are especially cold tolerant. So both Mighty Fine and Altus survived with relatively little winter injury after we had that terrible cold snap in February of 2021. You remember when all the pipes froze in Texas and it got very, very cold here? It got to negative 10 Fahrenheit in Clarksville, Arkansas. So really, really, really cold – much colder than we usually get in the winter. And we had to retrain from suckers almost every vine in the vineyard. So we didn't lose things, because they'll have little shoots that come up from the roots. But, um, Altus and Mighty Fine were two of the vines that survived with just minor cold injury symptoms. And they also have like very good quality parameters. Mighty Fine is one that we are recommending for the fresh market. So for those who are familiar with muscadine grapes, it's very similar to Supreme. So Supreme is kind of a gold-star standard for quality and fresh market muscadine grapes. It's big. It's really tasty. It has a skin that is a little bit more tender than a typical muscadine. And Mighty Fine has all of those characteristics. Plus, it has perfect flowers. So all grapes in the wild, um, are dioecious. That means that there are female vines and there are male vines, and you need a pollenizer – a male vine – to actually make fruit. But people have selected muscadines to have perfect flowers, so they don't need a pollenizer anymore. So Supreme needs a pollenizer. But Mighty Fine has equal or better flavor, good size, and it also has excellent texture, and it doesn't need a pollenizer. Plus, it's cold hardy, so we think it will work really well here in Arkansas and also in North Carolina and other parts of the country where you can get cold injury on muscadines.”
Jack Travis: So Mighty Fine is good – table grape good. Uh, just fruit to just pick and eat and whatnot.
Margaret Worthington: “Yeah. That's right. Um, you know, I think an interesting thing about table grape muscadines – I grew up eating a ton of muscadines. I'm from eastern North Carolina, and muscadines are a big popular crop in coastal Carolinas and in Georgia. Um, there you'll always see muscadines in the grocery store and like at Walmart, you know, on roadside stands in the fall. It's something that we would grow up eating a lot, and they're my number one favorite fruit. So I was really kind of shocked when I moved to Arkansas. And even though they are really well adapted here, you never see fresh market muscadine grapes on the shelf. So that's something that I hope to change over my career here. Um, but a lot of people associate muscadine grapes with having bad texture. So, um, the skin on some of the older cultivars can be really, really thick. Often you'll see people who will just kind of squeeze the innards of the muscadine into their mouth and then spit out the seeds, so they won't eat the seeds or the skin. Um, something like Mighty Fine has a skin that is very edible. It still has the big seeds that you would need to spit out, but it's got a skin that is tender that can be eaten. It's not like a grape skin – it's still thicker than that – but I find it an enjoyable eating experience as a whole grape. So there's a lot of variety within muscadines and texture. So that's got a great texture and a really great flavor.”
Jack Travis: Interesting. And there's some history with Mighty Fine as well, right? Like the phrase itself.
Margaret Worthington: “Well, actually, you know, it's an interesting challenge to come up with a new variety name. And we get to do this a lot in the fruit breeding program here. Um, you know, I think in companies they have a whole marketing arm behind them. And for me, it's kind of like me, and we have a guy in the technology commercialization office we work with, Parker Cole, who's really good at names too. But this one actually was a suggestion from somebody who came to a field day. There was a guy who gave me a business card, and on the back he wrote “Mighty Fine.” And I was like, actually, I like that – it rhymes with muscadine. And the other thing about Mighty Fine that I like, um, my predecessor, John Clark, who actually founded our muscadine breeding program – he's, uh, a folksy guy, and he's always like, ‘Well, that's mighty fine.’ And so I thought it was a nice homage to John Clark, as well as rhyming with muscadine.”
Jack Travis: I love it. Um, and then there's the Altus variety as well.
Margaret Worthington: “Yeah. So Altus is one that is more targeted towards wine, juices, jellies – for general processing. Uh, we named it Altus in honor of Altus, Arkansas, which is our main wine-growing region here in the state. Um, it's also where it showed a lot of its value. We had it planted in a larger trial at Post Winery. Um, and it came across that cold damage event in 2021 with relatively little injury compared to Noble, which is kind of the standard black-fruited processing muscadine in that area. So that's one of the reasons that led us to want to release it. Um, very productive. Makes a lovely juice, lovely wine, um, and great jellies and that sort of thing too. So it's also perfect-flowered and I'll say both have a black, dark purple fruit.”
Jack Travis: And I was hoping you could also talk about these new cultivars in the context of the University of Arkansas fruit breeding program, and just talk about how these are significant innovations and just how the program has changed over time.
Margaret Worthington: “As a little bit of history, our fruit breeding program was established in 1964 by Jim Moore. He was an Arkansas native, and he left to go to Rutgers for grad school. And then he went to work for the USDA in Beltsville, Maryland. And I've always heard the story that he got an opportunity to return to the University of Arkansas, and his supervisor said, ‘You'll never be heard from again,’ you know, but he managed to come back here and he built a really, you know, internationally renowned fruit breeding program here in Arkansas. Even though we're not, you know, a dominant fruit industry in the way that a California or Washington state would be, we have a really important fruit breeding program here. So he established breeding programs in blackberries – and that's still really our flagship program – but also in strawberries, grapes, blueberries, peaches. So we've had a lot of different crops that we've worked on over the years. And fortunately, we're not working on all those anymore, because I would go crazy. But grapes and blackberries have been our biggest success. So the grape program was one of the original programs that was established, and at one point it was our biggest program. His dream was to combine the interesting flavors you would get from Muscat wines and from Concord grapes that have native Vitis labrusca from the Northeast U.S. with a table grape texture to develop new commodities there, and he hoped to ultimately create an eastern table grape industry. So he did a great job in combination with John Clark, who was his successor, in building these really great-flavored grapes. And we've had a number of public releases from our program – things like Jupiter, which is my favorite, that just has amazing flavor. Um, but the big impact from that program has been in our collaboration with the private sector. That we had a long-term breeding agreement with IFG, a breeding program out in California that created Cotton Candy grapes and Candy Dreams and all these highly flavored table grapes. So that's been really exciting to see Arkansas products kind of coming out and being used on a big scale across the world. However, you know, that material is not grown in Arkansas. It's not grown in the Southeast. It's grown in other parts of the world. So around the early 2000s, John Clark started thinking like, well, if we want to build an eastern table grape program, then we should focus on the original eastern table grape – muscadines. You know, they're so disease resistant. Things like powdery mildew, downy mildew, grapevine viruses, Pierce's disease – things that really plague the Vitis vinifera industry. And people grow a lot of Vitis vinifera grapes across the Southeast, but they have to spray them all the time. So it's really financially burdensome. It's a problem for a lot of reasons, right? Um, so muscadine grapes are very resistant. They also, um, kind of are adapted. They are less – they're cold sensitive to the midwinter temperatures – but they don't get that spring freeze injury. They kind of have evolved here in this environment, where they're used to like our kind of crazy springs where it gets cold and hot and cold and hot. So they break bud really late and flower really late. And they're just, um, they handle the rain that we get here. They're from this area. They like it here. They like the humidity. They like acid soil. They like all that. So he started breeding muscadine grapes, and he started doing this in about 2006, 2007. And, um, I was really excited – I started here in 2016. And, you know, having grown up eating muscadine grapes, I was really thrilled to work on them. So these two new releases were from crosses that were made in 2010. They were selected in 2012, and just now they're coming out for public release this year. So they'll finally be something that people can buy, um, from catalogs around the country this year. And then hopefully they are important for growers across the Southeast.”
Jack Travis: Yeah, it's an exciting moment for the fruit breeding program – and for you personally.
Margaret Worthington: “Yeah, it definitely is. And, you know, one point I want to make too is when we started breeding blackberries, it wasn't a commodity that you would see on supermarket shelves. So like even 20 years ago, if you were to go to a supermarket, you would not see blackberries on the shelf. You would find them like at a farmer's market, you know, it'd be something that people would pick wild, that sort of thing. But it wasn't a global commodity the way that it is now. So I really love muscadine grapes, particularly. I love fresh market muscadine grapes. I also love them for wine and juices, but I think they're just a gorgeous fruit for the fresh industry. And, um, I hope that by the time I retire that you will see muscadines, you know, as their own little fruit commodity. It's different from a grape. So it's not a replacement of a grape, but maybe a fifth berry commodity or something on the supermarket shelves. It's really great for growers in this region. I think, um, it's a fall crop. So a lot of people will grow blueberries and blackberries here across the Southeast. And, you know, maybe they have labor that they need to keep for a longer period of time. And a fall crop makes a lot of sense for them. Um, and yeah, I just think they're a neat product, particularly if you can make it so that it's an inside fruit. We always joke about it – that like muscadines are tasty, but it involves a lot of spitting, which is not very sophisticated. So we want to breed them to have thinner skins, a firm flesh that is not like – you hear people talk about, like, oyster flesh sometimes on a muscadine. So we want them to have a flesh that is much more like a table grape. And we want to get rid of the seeds as well. And we now have a lot of seedless selections in our program too, through a breeding agreement we have with the company Gardens Alive that have introgressed seedlessness from Vitis vinifera grapes to muscadine grapes – that kind of stenospermocarpic seedlessness. And it's been a real challenge, because it's like crossing a horse and a donkey to get a hybrid. And so you have ultimately the same problem that you do with a mule – of a lot of sterility in the first-generation hybrids.”
Jack Travis: So what's next for the – for muscadines within the fruit breeding program? What's next for you, Margaret Worthington?
Margaret Worthington: “So I've been working with my colleague Renee Threlfall in our food science department on a new USDA NIFA Specialty Crops Research Initiative project. The project is called Vitis by Muscadinia, and it's a project focused on developing disease-resistant, flavorful Vitis by Muscadinia hybrids. So our thought is, you know, people have been working on muscadine grapes for like 100 years. And ever since the beginning of breeding of muscadine grapes, people have been interested in breeding them and crossing them with Vitis vinifera. There are so many complementarities there in terms of muscadine bringing the disease resistance, Vitis vinifera bringing a lot of those quality traits – stable anthocyanins, good texture, seedlessness. And it's just been such a challenge to make the wide hybrids, but it's also not been very scientific how it's been done in the past – not due to lack of expertise among the previous researchers, just that we didn't have the modern genetic tools that we have available to us today. So the project is focused on using modern genetic information to identify disease resistance alleles and new loci contributing to disease resistance, and identify good parents to using crosses to bring new muscadine disease resistance traits to Vitis vinifera grapes, and then at the same time to bring new quality traits into muscadine grapes. And in addition to having those kind of breeding and genetics components, we also are really working on the muscadine side on understanding how do you market a new fruit commodity. Do we want to call it a grape? Do we want to call it a muscadine? When you have a seedless muscadine, do you want to just call it something totally different – Razzle Dazzle Berry? I don't know, you know? So we have to answer all of these questions, I think. Um, and we're doing variety trials across the country. So it's a big project that involves 32 different scientists from different institutions around the country – Cornell, University of Georgia, University of Florida, UC Davis, etc. Um, and it's really been fun to work on and collaborate with people in different sides of science and industry, um, different places around the country, all coming together to figure out how can we develop these wide hybrids, um, faster and better and make new products for people to enjoy.”
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