Ruby Seedless Grape

What’s blooming in the area: Rose of Sharon, tea and miniature roses, some kind of yucca, buddleia, winterfat, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, bindweed, blue trumpets, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, ragtag bouncing Bess, mullein, white sweet clover, yellow and white evening primroses, alfilerillo, lamb’s quarter, amaranth, ragweed, goat’s head, chamisa, broom senecio, snakeweed, wild lettuce, horseweed, áñil del muerto peaked, Hopi tea, gumweed, hairy golden, heath and purple asters, native sunflowers peaked, cockle bur, sandbur.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Red hot poker, golden spur columbine, nasturtium, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos, perky Sue.
Looking east: Large-leaf soapwort peaked, scarlet gilia, California poppy, squash, hollyhock, winecup, Jupiter’s beard, sweet alyssum from seed, African marigolds, Maximilian sunflowers, zinnia; ripe raspberries and tomatoes.
Looking south: Blaze roses, Sensation cosmos; rugosa rose hips red, edible grapes.
Looking west: Russian sage, catmint, Mönch aster peaked, Silver King artemisia.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, moss rose, French marigold, tomato.
Inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium, bougainvillea.
Animal sightings: Bees, ants, few grasshoppers.
Weather: Soaking rain last night; nature continues to prepare for winter, plants are going out of bloom, leaves are beginning to turn color and a few are dropping. 11:22 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: A Roman Catholic community must have wine, and so, in the early years, stoneware jugs were sent to frontier missions every three years or so by ox-cart. Franciscans tried to become self-sufficient, but grapes are sensitive to climate and soil. Whatever seeds or cuttings they brought, only one prospered, a large, dark fruited one possibly related to the Sardinian Mónica.
The vines García de San Francisco planted in 1629 at Senecú, the first settlement north of the Jornada del Muerto, survived the destruction of the Piro pueblo by Apache in 1675. Cuttings were taken to El Paso by García when he moved there in 1659 and may have been sent to the larger northern missions like San Ildefonso before the pueblo revolt of 1680.
Juan de Torquemada reported Tewa speakers were using "mucha uba" in bread in 1723, 29 years after de Vargas reconquered the Black Mesa. Francisco Dominguez saw vines growing in Santa Cruz in 1776. More recently, Barbara Freire-Marreco found grapes cultivated by San Ildefonso in 1911, probably for raisins, while the Interior Department observed uvas to the north along the El Rito, the Chama below Abiquiú and the Rio Grande between Velarde and Dixon in the 1930's.
When I moved here in 1991, two people had vines, one group growing along a sturdy rail fence, the other spreading onto wires strung between posts in a field. A few years later someone living near the river put in a vineyard with sapling posts supporting each root and top wires spreading the tallest growth.
I never see their fruit which tends to be protected by large, hairy, scallop-edged leaves, so I don’t know their varieties. The local stores offer green, red and purple varieties, and more are available by mail. I bought one of each in 1998, with the expectation the purple Concord derived from the hardy Vitis labrusco grown in upstate New York would do well, and the zone 7 green Thompson seedless vinifera popularized by Armenian refugees would fail. Instead, a Ruby seedless survived, and this year produced its first edible fruit.
Harold Olmo began work with the vinifera hybrid in 1939 by crossing the popular, but essentially tasteless winter grape, Emperor, with a seedless hybrid developed by Alberto Pirovano from the Muscat of Alexandria and a seedless sultanina. Olmo selected a cultivar in 1950 for further development, and released Ruby in 1968 when it quickly became the late-season crop in the San Joaquin valley. It has been since eclipsed by imports from Chile.
A zone 7 vine is a poor choice for the Española valley, and has been replaced by Flame in the local hardware. Most springs my Ruby vine leafs out in late April or early May and is killed by frost. The replacement growth keeps the root alive by producing buds for the next season’s fruiting wood, but doesn’t usually flower.
This year the weather stayed cool and leaves didn’t appear until May 14. Ruby thrives in the hot summers of the San Joaquin: it needs at least 100 days with temperatures above 50 degrees and cool nights. Here, when I’ve had fruit develop, there wasn’t enough time for it to mature. In 2006, I found fruit August 20 that didn’t begin to turn until September 16. In 2007, it was September 22 before I saw color. This year, the fruit appeared earlier, around July 12, and I ate some last weekend, but the still forming green clusters haven’t a chance.
A strange season for the valley, this, but one simpático for an alien from California whose fruit not only was sweet and thin-skinned, but contained but the merest remains of seeds that had been aborted by some recessive genetic pattern unique to the sultana.
Notes:
Domínguez, Francisco Atansio. Republished 1956 as The Missions of New Mexico, 1776, translated and edited by Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez.
Torquemada, Juan de. De los Veinte í un Líbros Rítuales í Monarchia Indiana, 1723, cited by William Wilfred Robbins, John Peabody Harrington and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.
US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Ruby seedless grapes, 28 September 2008.