The Fox Grape

We heard our friend use the term "foxy" to describe the taste of one of the wines that he drank and wondered what that could be. We didn't ask him but did ask our friend, who happens to be a veterinarian and she went into a long discussion regarding the odors that a fox can produce. It couldn't be that we thought. Although, I suppose that is better than the odor of skunk. So we were left in the dark about exactly what "foxy" meant.
To me, it immediately conjured up the image of Aesop's Fable, "The Fox and the Grape" but it still didn't make any sense. Well, it turns out that the origin of the term "foxy" as it relates to American grapevines is quite a mystery. The most comprehensive list of hypotheses that I've come across is in the book written by Thomas Pinney and published in 1989 called A History of Wine in America From the Beginnings to Prohibition. In the Appendix 1 to his book, Pinney says that the term fox grape has been applied to more than one North American grape. At one time or another, labrusca, rotundifolia, riparia and cordifolia varieties were all called the fox grape. Recently, there is agreement that the fox grape refers to some variety of the species labrusca. Reference to the fox grape was made as early as 1622 by John Bonoeil when describing the native grapes of Virginia. Pinney goes through a list of possibilities for the origin of the term, including the fact that "fox" may originally have come from the French "faux". Regardless of how the term originated, there is now a consensus, due to it's use, that "fox" refers to an odor. That odor has been chemically determined to be that of methyl anthranilate. The flavor of methyl anthranilate is that of a Concord grape and dimethyl anthranilate is used to flavor grape Koolaid!

1. The structure was found on Wikipedia: Methyl anthranilate.
2. All structures were drawn by the freely available drawing program from ACD Labs called ACD/ChemSketch Freeware.