Small but Mighty, Petite Pearl Delivers Vinifera Taste with Hybrid Hardiness

A few weeks into harvest’s 14-hour workdays, all the grapes start blurring together. But then there’s Petite Pearl. And it’s the type of grape that can make even the sleep-deprived harvest interns poke their heads out and wonder: “What is this?” Its dense clusters of small, blue-black berries are unlike almost anything else on the crush pad.

It’s truly “in a lane of its own,” says Tyzok Wharton, winemaker at Carboy, which has four locations throughout Colorado. When they first started working with the grape in 2017, they weren’t quite sure what to do with it. They set out to make a rosé but they ended up doing a sought-after single-varietal red. Petite Pearl was bred in Minnesota by Tom Plocher, owner of Plocher Vines. His goal was to create a grape that could withstand cold winters, be disease resistant and—perhaps most important—make good, well-balanced wine. Petite Pearl hit the market in 2009, but Plocher stood on the shoulders of viticulturists before him.

Like Louis Suelter, who in the 1800s sought to breed a grape that could survive cold winters. The result was the Beta, which you can still find growing on old fences around Minnesota. It does indeed withstand cold winters. “But the wine is terrible,” Plocher says “Beta would be used as a parent to produce generations of cold-hardy grapes.” It’s one of the key grapes in Petite Pearl’s complex parentage.

Elmer Swenson, a mentor of Plocher, spent his life breeding hardy grapes. “I was able to bring together the University of Minnesota’s breeding line with Swenson’s to create the Petite Pearl,” says Plocher.

“Compared to the other cold-hardy varieties that we’re growing, it has a chemistry more similar to vinifera varieties,” says Ethan Joseph, head winegrower of Shelburne Vineyard in Vermont. Joseph was the first to plant the grape when it was released. At the time, he was just trying to find grapes that would grow well in Vermont. But it isn’t enough to just be hardy in the cold. A grape needs to be able to withstand a myriad of unpredictable climate shifts. “In the last five years or so, our winters have been warming—so what’s become more important is a grape’s hardiness in the shoulder seasons when climate has become unpredictable.”

“When I started breeding Petite Pearl, the big issue was hardiness to extreme cold mid-winter temperatures,” says Plocher. “With the progression of climate change, warm spring temperatures arrive earlier and encourage some grapes to lose their winter dormancy. But there’s a risk of freezing when temperatures drop again. Petite Pearl is a late-budding variety. And even if there is a freeze that kills its primary buds, its secondary buds can be up to 80% fruitful. This isn’t the case with classic European varieties like Merlot.”

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