Consumers who want to taste grapes with a different flavor are in luck. Horticulturists in charge of fruit breeding at International Fruit Genetics in California have created a new hybridized species that tastes remarkably like cotton candy, by cross-breeding a Concord-type grape with a variety of Vitis vinifera, a common grape sold in grocery stores around the country. Grown commercially by the California vineyard Grapery, the resulting fruit is a sugary-sweet hybrid that has 12 percent more sugar than typical store-bought grapes.
Can we peel you a grape?
- “When you go to the supermarket there's, like, 15 kinds of apples,” explained horticulturist David Cain. “We want to give consumers the same array of flavors for grapes.”
- Researchers are also breeding hybrid grapes that taste like strawberries, pineapples, and mangoes, but it can take 10 years or more to create a new grape. A gumball-flavored grape is expected to be the next new flavor to hit store shelves.
- Cotton Candy grapes cost about $6 USD per pound -- more than twice the price of most seedless grapes.