Evidences for an Alternative Genealogy of 'Sangiovese'

Two different hypothesis for the parentage of 'Sangiovese', the most important and widespread Italian winegrape, have been proposed by some previous studies. We screened our grapevine collection, mostly comprising south Italian cultivars collected to preserve biodiversity, to asses kinships. Surprisingly we found two previously unreported candidate parents for 'Sangiovese'. The first putative parent is 'Ciliegiolo' a well know variety already addressed as relative of 'Sangiovese'; the second putative parent is 'Negrodolce', an old local variety we recovered and was considered lost during the last century. In order to obtain a stronger statistical support for this new kinship, we tested seventy different microsatellite markers but only 57 were found reliable. The new proposed parentage stood well even with such a in depth molecular analysis whereas only one discrepancy was found in one of the 57 microsatellite marker analyzed. This discrepancy is certainly due to a null-allele and therefore it should not impair our hypothesis but it points out limits of the microsatellites profiling as a pedigree research method considering that this is the third different kinship proposed so far for 'Sangiovese'. Thus in this article, by means of detailed molecular fingerprinting, we provide a completely new strong evidence for a south Italian origin of 'Sangiovese' and we discuss our findings comparing our data with those previously reported by other authors.