All progress is due to crazy people

 

There are always a thousand different reasons why things are exactly the way they are. Most people accept that those thousand-different-reasons are proof that the system is optimized and cannot be improved.

Crazy people though, have a vision of a different "optimal" solution. 

"Put a steam-engine on a ship? Are you mad?"

"Put a dozen breach loading rifles on a spindle and arrange it so you can turn a crank and have them rapidly fire in succession? Are you insane?"

So I wander around the internet and make mental notes of "crazy people". 

One such crazy person is a fellow in Connecticut who planted 122 grape varieties reputed to be "low care".

Whereas good grape culture involves planting them in full sun and training them so there is good air-flow through the canopy, he planted them on the northwest side of a hill and planted them at more than twice the recommended density with ZERO fungicide or insecticide sprays. A rank, impenetrable tangle resulted, the Vitis equivalent of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

His approach was akin to one of my college professors. That professor's belief was that a good test should "smear" the students from 10% to 90% rather than 70%-to-100% that most professors sought. His thinking was that the test lost resolution when the scores were confined to the top 1/3 of the scale.

His findings

For making red wine and jam, and as blue table grapes:
Leon Millot
Marechal Foch
Oberlin Noir
Wine King

Note: The author admits that attaining high enough BRIX was a struggle given the limited sunlight of his site. That biases his selections to the very earliest ripening wine grapes with Wine King (bred in Texas by Munson) being the exception.

For making white wine, and as white table grapes:
L’Acadie Blanc
Petite Amie

For making white and rose' wines, and as blue table grapes:
Steuben

For pink-red table grapes and jam:
Somerset Seedless

For blue table grapes (small berries) and jam:
Concord Seedless

For white table grapes:
Spartan Seedless

Gratuitous Editorializing

This guy's chamber-of-horrors testing reminds me of the story in Exodus.

The Jewish people were basically trapped in an elevator with their mother-in-law for two generations.

God handed them an instruction manual that allowed them to thrive under conditions that should have killed them twenty times over. Whether you want to attribute the "instruction manual" to divine sources or not, you must admit that the rules were honed under the most trying of circumstances.

That instruction manual is still in print. Maybe the rules seem like over-kill, but if you follow them you should be relatively safe from unintended consequences. That is quite unlike the knee-jerk response demanded by the woke's outrage du jure.