PCR analysis of experimental and commercial wines by means of nuclear and chloroplast SSRs

Genetic identification of varieties of grapevines in finished wines is still debated: several papers showed that DNA is extracted and analysed by PCR rather easily from the must, but few barely reproducible results have been presented for DNA extracted in wines after fermentation. This work experimented a method based on CTAB followed by silica purification with NucleoSpin Plant Kit columns to extract DNA from experimental wines of 1 year and commercial wines of 1 or 2 years. The comparison of SSR profiles of wines with those of their grapevine varieties showed that total identity was equal to 47.41% in experimental wines and to 24.31% in commercial wines. In experimental wines, three PCR replicates of three independent DNA preparations are sufficient to capture the alleles of the original grapevine variety, while in the commercial ones this possibility is related to the kind of wine and microsatellite.