Cotton Candy grapes are created through a lengthy and meticulous process of traditional plant breeding, specifically cross-pollination, rather than genetic engineering or adding artificial flavors. Here's how they are made:
- Breeders select two grape varieties with complementary traits: one is a Concord-like grape (commonly used in juices and jellies) and the other is a common table grape species (Vitis vinifera). The goal is to combine the sweet, mellow, and slightly vanilla flavor of the Concord grape with the texture and seedless quality of table grapes
- The process involves manually transferring pollen from the male flowers of one grape variety to the female flowers of the other, producing hybrid seeds. These seeds are then grown into young grapevines, which are carefully tested for flavor, sweetness, texture, yield, and disease resistance
- Because seedless grapes cannot reproduce naturally, breeders often remove embryos from the grapes and grow them in test tubes before planting them in fields, ensuring the desired traits are preserved
- This breeding and selection process is extremely laborious and can take many years-often over a decade-with breeders testing hundreds of thousands of plants to find the ideal hybrid that tastes like cotton candy but is still a natural fruit
- Once the perfect grapevine is identified, it is cloned and cultivated on a larger scale. The final Cotton Candy grapes have about 12% more sugar than typical grapes, giving them their signature sweet, carnival-like flavor without any added sugar or artificial ingredients
In summary, Cotton Candy grapes are the result of careful hybridization and selection of grape varieties over many years, producing a natural grape that tastes remarkably like cotton candy due to its unique sugar content and flavor profile
