About a year ago, I learned the answer to why we have white wines. (One answer: they come from white grape juice or from red grapes where there was no skin contact in the making of the wine.)
I found a very well written research paper and started to create a blog about it and the blog became a mile long. I decided to approach what seems to be an easy answer in a stepwise fashion so I took the opposite approach, writing first about how red wines get their color:
Anthocyanins Give Red Wine Their Color
I couldn't stop at there because I wanted to explain how anthocyanins were produced and so I wrote the following blogposts about anthocyanin production beginning with the amino acid phenylalanine and proceeding through the Flavonoid Pathway:
Why is Red Wine Colored Red
I then found another reference that looked at both the General Phenylpropanoid Pathway and the Flavonoid Pathway in more detail and felt compelled to share this:
General Phenylpropanoid/flavonoid Pathway
Finally, I was able to blog about how Boss et al. determined that anthocyanin was produced only in the grape berry skin, based on some elegant Northern blot experiments:
Anthocyanin Production in Grape Berry Skins
Stay tuned for the next blogpost which will use this information on red wine color to explain how the world came to have white grapes and white wine.
References:
1. Boss P, Davies C, Robinson S (1996b), "Expression of anthocyanin biosynthesis pathway genes in red and white grapes", Plant Mol Biol, 32:565 - 569.
2. Lijavetzky et al., 2006, Mol. Genet. Genomics, 2006: 427-435.
3. José Tomás Matus, Felipe Aquea and Patricio Arce-Johnson, BMC Plant Biology, 2008, 8:83.
4. Yung-Fen Huang, Sandrine Vialet, Jean-Luc Guiraud, Laurent Torregrosa, Yves Bertrand,Veronique Cheynier, Patrice This and Nancy Terrier, A negative MYB regulator of proanthocyanidin accumulation, identified through expression quantitative locus mapping in the grape berry, New Phytologist, (2014) 201: 795–809 doi: 10.1111/nph.12557.
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