Morphological and Molecular Profiling of Twelve Native Grapevine Varieties From Crete and Thira Islands of Southern Greece: Insights Into Intra-varietal Diversity

As in the case with other countries with well-documented history in grape cultivation, the discrimination of Greek grapevine resources is an arduous and complicated task due to the use of numerous synonyms and homonyms, the evolution of many phenotypes within varieties and the doubtful origin of several Greek grapevine landraces. The aim of the present study was to present a comprehensive exploration and characterization of twelve autochthonous Greek grapevine cultivars grown in various regions of Crete and Thira islands of southern Greece, using both ampelographic traits and molecular markers. From 2018 to 2022, a total of 112 accessions from commercial vineyards were analyzed using 48 ampelographic characters developed by the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) and 10 microsatellite loci (SSR). According to both methods, the results showed that: (a) nine of the twelve studied varieties appeared in a single cluster in the ampelography-based clustering with the exception of ‘Vilana’, ‘Moschato Spinas’ and ‘Mandilaria’ phenotypes that exhibited a relative significant intra-varietal variation, (b) the matrices produced from ampelographic data revealed a distance between the studied samples from Cretan and Thira vineyards and the reference samples from the national grapevine repository for ‘Athiri’ and ‘Aidani lefko’ varieties, (c) ‘Dafni’ exhibited a clear molecular-genetic distinction and was significantly separated from the other cultivars studied, (d) our data did not support the previously reported high similarity between the varieties ‘Vilana’ and ‘Vidiano’. The combination of ampelographic description and molecular determination of the SSR profile proved to be effective for studying genetic diversity and identifying grapevine cultivars.