How Cotton Candy Grapes Are Made (360° VR)

Hi, I'm Jim Beagle, CEO of Grapery. We're here today in our Moondrops Vineyard near Bakersfield, California, and we're excited to share with you what we do different at Grapery. We grow the best tasting grapes in the world and it's our passion. It's not an easy thing to do. It sets us apart from a lot of other farmers, but it's so exciting to be able to grow great tasting grapes and deliver them to shoppers around the world so people can share these with their families and really get an appreciation for how wonderful grapes can taste. We're in our Moondrops Vineyard here today. Moondrops are a unique variety with a long shape and they taste absolutely delicious. This variety took us several years to develop. We had a fun contest with consumers to come up with the name Moondrops and most people who eat these grapes say they're the best tasting grapes they've ever had. We have a wide lineup of different grapes that we grow. We grow cotton candy grapes, which are the rock star of the Grapery lineup. They're our most popular grape and the one that people react to most strongly. We have these Moondrops. We have Teardrops, which are shaped like chili peppers, but we found out if we called them chili peppers, kids wouldn't touch them. They think they're spicy. We have our Flavor Promise grapes, which are available really throughout the season in different colors and are grapes that just taste really fantastic. We have our Gumdrops, which is a really exciting new variety of grapes. It tastes like grape candy. We have some available early in July and August and some available later in October. So how do we do this? How do we grow these things that have all these amazing flavors that you've never seen before? We work with a breeding company who's breeding grapes for grape flavor. It's not GMO. It's all traditional cross-pollination. We're going to cross one flower from one grape with another flower from another grape vine and see what you come up with. We never really know what to expect or what comes out of that, but we've been fortunate enough to find some things like Cotton Candy grapes and Gumdrop grapes for grape flavors. We search all around the world for unique grape varieties that are native to different places in the world that have some interesting characteristic, and then we breed them with other grapes to make them better and make them something people are going to want to buy in the stores. When we found the Cotton Candy grapes for the first time, we didn't even know they tasted like Cotton Candy, so they don't actually taste like Cotton Candy on the vine. It's only after we harvest them and get them cold in the refrigerated setting that the Cotton Candy flavor actually comes out. So it was a bit of an accident that we stumbled onto that. Cotton Candy grapes are the most difficult grape there is to grow. Not all the bunches on these vines ripen at the same time, and with Cotton Candy, it's really variable. They're all ripening at different times. Every one of these clusters of grapes is harvested by hand, so a worker has to evaluate every cluster and make a decision on whether or not to harvest it based on how ripe it is. And if you harvest a cluster of Cotton Candy grapes before it's ripe, it doesn't taste like Cotton Candy. We have to be very precise in how we work with people. We work with our crews of laborers in the fields to understand how the fruit ripens, how to identify the ripe fruit, the unripe fruit, and it's a whole new technique and thought process and strategy and system for how we harvest grapes to deliver to grocery stores because flavor is the most important thing.