The varietal authentication of wines is fundamental for assessing wine quality,
and it is part of its compositional profiling. The availability of historical,
cultural and chemical composition information is extremely important for quality
evaluation. DNA-based techniques are a powerful tool for proving the varietal
composition of a wine. SSR-amplification of genomic residual
Vitis
vinifera
DNA, namely Wine DNA Fingerprinting (WDF) is able to
produce strong, analytical evidence concerning the monovarietal nature of a
wine, and for blended wines by generating the probability of the
presence/absence of a certain variety, all in association with a dedicated
bioinformatics elaboration of genotypes associated with possible varietal
candidates. Together with WDF we could exploit Bioinformatics techniques, due to
the number of grape genomes grown. In this paper, the use of WDF and the
development of a bioinformatics tool for allelic data validation, retrieved from
the amplification of 7 to 10 SSRs markers in the
Vitis vinifera
genome, are reported. The wines were chosen based on increasing complexity; from
monovarietal, experimental ones, to commercial monovarietals, to blended
commercial wines. The results demonstrate that WDF, after calculation of
different distance matrices and Neighbor-Joining input data, followed by
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) can effectively describe the varietal nature
of wines. In the unknown blended wines the WDF profiles were compared to
possible varietal candidates (Merlot, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and
Zinfandel), and the output graphs show the most probable varieties used in the
blend as closeness to the tested wine. This pioneering work should be meant as
to favor in perspective the multidisciplinary building-up of on-line databanks
and bioinformatics toolkits on wine. The paper concludes with a discussion on an
integrated decision support system based on bioinformatics, chemistry and
cultural data to assess wine quality.