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["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

Most of the Aronia improvement seems to have been done in eastern Europe, using a relatively limited range of material collected in America.  The local experiment station has a collection of Aronia varieties that I evaluated one year.  The only real differences in the cultivars was some variation in productivity and about a week's difference in ripening times over the whole group of ten or so varieties.  Sugar was 21 to 24 Brix.  The two best performing  cultivars were Nero and Viking.  This was several years ago when the plants were just getting into production.  Now the row looks like a hedge and the differences between varieties are even less obvious.  I grew a row of seedlings of Viking that had so little variation you could almost plant a field from seed and still get useable production.
-Lon Rombough
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Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003. 
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On Aug 31, 2009, at 5:27 AM, mIEKAL aND wrote:

The range of diversity seems extremely narrow & I imagine the  
initiative would benefit from more selections & cross breeding with  
local genetics.  It was mentioned that aronia is native to Wisconsin  
tho I've never seen it myself.