Lex Alexander reports for his day job that a Lewisville-based businessman is getting ready to make bank on muscadines.  From Lex’s article in the N&R:

Bob Dalton , who once blended tobaccos for R.J. Reynolds, is now
taking a nutritional supplement made of muscadine skins to market under
the brand name Vinetra . He believes it will help fight cancer,
rheumatoid arthritis and many other ailments.

He grows
muscadines on land in the Yadkin River valley that has been in his
family for generations, land on which muscadines still grow wild.

His
products — essentially, powdered muscadine skin that can be taken as
capsules or stirred into fruit smoothies or other drinks — have not
been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration and make no health
claims.

But resveratrol, a chemical found in muscadine skins, has
been widely studied in cancer research. According to the National
Cancer Institute , research suggests it may inhibit the growth of or
cause the death of leukemia cells and cells of cancers of the head,
neck, breast, ovary, prostate and colon, among others. It also may be a
potent anti-inflammatory agent…

He had noticed that his wild muscadines were more resistant to
Japanese beetles than his cultivated varieties, such as merlot. A
doctor friend suggested he analyze the various types of grapes to see
what might be making the muscadines more resistant. Dalton was familiar
with such analyses from his work with tobacco.

At harvest time,
he gathered a gallon of each variety, and his friend sent them to a
researcher. The researcher, Dalton says, called to ask where he got the
muscadine grapes.

"I’ve been a research scientist for 40 years
almost, and I’ve never in all my life seen anything with the amount of
resveratrol this has got in it," Dalton recalls the researcher as
saying.

Dalton’s response? "Bill, what the hell is resveratrol?"

Dalton spent the next six weeks traveling the state, gathering muscadines from all over and sending them for analysis.

He
created a pin map with information on each batch of grapes. He found
that the farther west in the state grapes were picked, the higher the
levels of resveratrol they held — up to a point, about 1,400 or 1,500
feet above sea level, above which the grapes won’t grow well.

The
Yadkin Valley grapes, he found, had the highest levels of resveratrol
and other antioxidants. Antioxidants are believed to benefit the body
by attacking molecules called free radicals that are thought to
contribute to aging and disease.

Dalton also learned that he
could boost the levels of antioxidants in his grapes by subjecting them
to stress, such as by not irrigating them frequently. He also
discovered that grapes needed to be harvested sooner than wine grapes
normally would be if he wanted to maximize the resveratrol levels.

We’ve got some muscadines in our back yard, and I’m very good at introducing stress to all the vegetation on my land.  Looks like we might have the makings of a secondary income source.

Now that I think about it Esbee’s written before that she has the mighty muscadines in her yard.  I’ll need to clue her in on this new opportunity.