José Antão reacts to a Brainfood snippet about grapevine genetic resources conservation in Portugal (pdf):
The Portuguese are under-staffed. Pretty much all the work on intra-varietal diversity is done by Elsa Gonçalves and Antero Martins and their organization (Porvid). They give an example of one of the Portuguese native grapes with economic importance, but there are several dozens used in commercial vineyards and hundreds in the collections. Plus every once in a while they find a new variety that hadn’t been described previously. It’s a run against time, while increasing numbers of populations are eliminated (substituted by more fashionable varieties and commercially available clones).