engleski

The connection between autochthonous Croatian wine grape varieties and Zinfandel (Vitis vinifera L)

Zinfandel is one of America’ s most important red wine grapes. In the years 2000 and 2001, it took the second place behind Cabernet Sauvignon, in terms of planted area and percentage of total crushed crop in California, respectively. This project was undertaken in order to confirm, using microsatellite profiling and ampelography, that Zinfandel originates in Croatia as well as to characterize about 15 autochthonous (Grk, Barjanka, Bratkovina, Cetinka, Plavina etc… ) Croatian grape varieties. Microsatellite profiles were obtained for all varieties at 25 polymorphic loci. The results support a parent or offspring relationship between Zinfandel and the Dalmatian cultivars Grk, Plavina and Vranac. Furthermore, they confirm that Plavac mali, the most important red wine cultivar of Croatia, is a progeny of the cross between another Croatian cultivar, Dobričić, and Zinfandel. These findings strongly support the Dalmatian origin of Zinfandel, despite the presence of the same cultivar in Italy under the name Primitivo. The performed likelihood analysis supports the genetic findings to a very high degree of probability. With the available allele frequency data at 20 SSR loci, a comparison of Zinfandel allele frequencies in a subgroup of Croatian cultivars (n = 17) and the UC Davis database (n > 300), containing cultivars grown all over the world, was performed. At all but five loci, Zinfandel alleles were more frequent in the Croatian gene pool than in the UC Davis database. We hypothesize that Zinfandel was widely grown in Dalmatia in the past but was eradicated due to pest/disease and gradually replaced by genetically more resistant offspring, Plavac mali. It is important to stress the usefulness of microsatellite profiling in conservation biology and in preservation of more than 100 unique Vitis vinifera L. genotypes present in Croatia today.

Zinfandel; DNA fingerprinting; microsatellites; cultivar identification

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