OENOPHILES will appreciate the subtlety of the discovery. The white and red grapes used in modern winemaking were produced by a mutation to a single gene.
The first varieties of Vitis vinifera, the most cultivated grape species, were black when ripe, a trait shared by most wild breeds, and which probably enticed birds and other animals to eat them and spread their seeds.
Now Shozo Kobayashi at the National Institute of Fruit Tree Science in Hiroshima, Japan, and colleagues report that at some point in the early evolution of grapes, a DNA element called a retrotransposon jumped from one part…
