Cotton candy grapes nutrition vs regular grapes

But Cotton Candy Grapes are an actual fruit — and taste strangely similar to the sickeningly sweet carnival treat.

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The oddly-flavored fruits were created by Grapery, a California-based table grape grower several years back, but they recently starting sweeping the East Coast.

They're only in season from Aug. 10 through Sept. 20, so fans go wild when they're available — or are sold out at their local markets.

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A grape bred in California tastes strangely similar to cotton candy. (David Zalubowski/AP)

"Could everybody stop buying cotton candy grapes so that I can get some," a Twitter user who goes by Diamond Allen wrote.

Another, @JoshySinger, complained: "I wanna try cotton candy grapes so bad but i can never find em."

Indeed, their season is short and their demand is high, so if these sweet little treats sound appealing to you, you'd better pick some up if you spot them before they're gone.

"They sell out quickly, shorter than a couple of days after they come in," an employee at an Upper East Side Whole Foods tells the Daily News. At the health-food retailer, the grapes go for $4.99 a pound.

And it's no secret why they quickly disappear. Though these green grapes look like the ones that typically line your grocer's produce shelves, Cotton Candy Grapes really do taste and smell like the spun sugar-on-a-stick indulgence found at ballparks and fairs throughout America — especially on the first bite.

Don't worry, they're not injected with sugar. They're sweet, unlike their tarter green grape cousins, but still totally healthy.

Cotton Candy Grapes are not a genetically modified organism.

Cotton Candy Grapes season is over by Sept. 20. (Ariel Scotti )

"We achieved the astonishing flavor using all-natural breeding practices," Grapery states on its web site. "We breed for flavor, continuously experimenting, trying out a wide range of cross-pollination combinations. Frankly, we were stunned when we discovered a new grape that tasted like cotton candy.

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"But, rest assured, it was accomplished by completely natural means. We didn't apply any 'cotton candy flavoring' or plant any sort of flavoring materials into the soil to attain the cotton candy flavor."

In the Tri-State area, Cotton Candy Grapes are stocked at D'Agostino, Fairway Market, Sam's Club, Stop & Shop, Wegmans and Whole Foods Market. Beyond that, anyone can try them out through the grocery delivery service Fresh Direct — where they seem to be more easily available for $4.79 per pound.

"I've seen several orders for them but we do have them in stock at the moment," a Fresh Direct employee reached by phone said. "They're available to any Fresh Direct customer across the country."

The Grapery website has a detailed, state-by-state list of spots its popular product is available locally.

And fans have taken note.

"Cotton Candy flavored grapes have changed the grape game," Twitter user @emilyyann17 wrote.

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"I just had a cotton candy flavored grape.... the very thing I didn't know I needed," @m0_nicaa added.

I just had a cotton candy flavored grape.... the very thing I didn't know I needed 😍

— dRUNK AUNti 🧚🏾‍♀️ (@M0_NiCAA) August 19, 2017

Other users were perplexed as to how, exactly, a grape can taste like the carnival fare.

"How...you get a grape to taste like cotton candy," confused tweeter @kmclame wondered.

And some pointed out that the cotton candy effect fades after the first few.

"I only tasted cotton candy the first bite of my first grape. Now I can't taste it. Oh well. Still good. I love grapes!," tweeter @IHeartHaiden noted.

The Cotton Candy grape looks and smells like a regular green grape. But the taste will evoke memories of the circus. Courtesy of Spencer Gray hide caption

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What exactly is cotton candy flavor anyway? Well, the blue is suppose to be raspberry. The yellow is lemon, and that ubiquitous pink puff ball has vanilla in it. seelensturm/Flickr.com hide caption

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Breeding seedless grapes isn't easy. Scientists have to remove the baby embryos from the plant and grow them in a test tube before later planting them in a field. Courtesy of David Cain/International Fruit Genetics hide caption

Breeding seedless grapes isn't easy. Scientists have to remove the baby embryos from the plant and grow them in a test tube before later planting them in a field.

Weighing in at about 18 grams of sugar per 100 grams of grapes, the designer fruit isn't cloyingly sweet. It has about 12 percent more sugar than regular table grapes but far less than raisins, which have more than three times the carbs.

So just how do these green grapes conjure up the sensation of spun-sugar melting on your tongue?

The fruit has very little tartness, chef Spencer tells the Salt. "It's like there's nothing to stop the sweetness. It just lingers on your tongue."

There are also hints off vanilla, Spencer says — and vanilla, it seems, is a key flavor in the archetypal "pink" cotton candy that makes your dentist cringe.

To get that vanilla flavor into the table grapes naturally, Cain and his team had to widen the plants' gene pool, mixing in genes from less common grape species.

Almost all of the table grapes in America belong to the species Vitis vinifera. There's nothing wrong with that. V. vinifera is a noble grape. It's used to make all of our wines.

But the world has dozens of grape species, and restricting the fruit in grocery stores to just one species also limits their flavors, Cain says.

Take, for instance, the Concord grape. It's used to make Welch's juices, jams and jellies. The dark-purple berry is packed with exotic flavors and aromas, including one known as "foxy." But the Concord grape has seeds and its skin tends to fall off — not great qualities for a table grape.

So Cain decided to put all the flavors of a Concord-like grape into the firm, crisp and seedless Vitis vineferia by crossing the two species. (He couldn't say exactly which Concord-like grape he used because it's a trade secret).

Breeding seedless grapes isn't easy, because they can't reproduce on their own. After fertilizing the plant, Cain and his team have to take out the baby embryos from the plant, then grow them in individual test tubes in the lab before they ever make it to the field.

Cain painstakingly created around 100,000 of these test tube plants before he stumbled upon the cotton-candy flavored grapes.

"The whole process takes at least six years and sometimes up to 15 years," Cain says. But he thinks it's worth it.

"A lot of fruit becomes tasteless by the time somebody buys it," Cain says. "We want to change that."

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