Varietal differences among the anthocyanin profiles of 50 red table grape cultivars studied by high performance liquid chromatography

In order to develop a method that allows to distinguish between grape cultivars, the anthocyanin profiles of 50 accessions from the “Misión Biológica de Galicia” germplasm collection were studied by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Nineteen anthocyanins were totally or partly identified and significant quantitative differences between the studied anthocyanin markers were found. With this method all 50 cultivars examinated could be easily distinguished from each other. In addition, the HPLC fingerprints and the relative-area anthocyanins plot for every cultivar has been elaborated and stored in a database. To test the validity of this method, several unknown samples have been analysed comparing their anthocyanin profile with the fingerprint database, and we may conclude that this has been proved to be of great value for grape cultivar recognition.