Rye, Vavilov and Vavilovian Mimicry

Whisky education from Whisk(e)y Advent 2025 (2025-12-08). Summary below; full write-up with sources and images: calendar/2025-12-08.qmd.

Rye may have been ‘accidentally’ domesticated via Vavilovian mimicry - weeds resembling wheat survived weeding. Geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who studied this, was persecuted under Stalin and died of starvation in prison.

Verbatim source text

Reproduced from calendar/2025-12-08.qmd (Whisk(e)y Advent 2025).

Apparently, rye is a little difficult to farm.

I was going to write a little about how rye fell out of popularity thorughout history, which somehow led to me reading about a persecuted Soviet geneticist.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a leading plant breeding and geneticist researcher in the Soviet Union. He hypothesized that rye was “accidentally” domesticated into a crop through something which is known today as Vavilovian mimicry: rye, which was an undesired crop/weed, was removed by farmers as they were growing wheat. Farmers removed all of the rye that was most visually distinct from the rest of the crop, leaving the more convincing “mimics” to propogate. Eventually, rye and wheat looked nearly identical.

Vavilov became a convenient scapegoat for the regime, and for his botanical crimes against the Motherland, he was starved to death in prison.

Anyways, that sounded a little more interesting to me tonight than talking about Prohibition; we’ll save that for another night. So pour a glass for yourself (and perhaps pour one out for Nikolai), and reflect on the evolutionary marvels that brought us this sassy glass of spirit. The corn in the mashbill should sweeten this up a bit compared to our last rye.