Quality Monitoring and Authenticity Assessment of Wines: Analytical and Chemometric Methods

Abstract

This chapter introduces the most relevant concepts about wine field, including terroir, manufacturing process and the Wine Protected Designation as a way ofauthentication. Contents of molecular organic acids, volatile species, polyphenols, amino acids, biogenic amines and inorganic species seem to depend on climatic, agricultural and wine-making factors. As result, compositional profiles of this beverage can be exploited as potential descriptors of wine quality and authenticity. Thus, a brief introduction about the chemical composition of wine is presented. The different analytical methods usednowadays for wine quality control are exposed. Furthermore, since most characterization studies are based on chemometrics to facilitate extraction of information, principal component analysis, cluster analysis and related as well as pattern recognitions methods currently used for discrimination and classification are also explained. The potential of combining different analytical techniques and chemometric methods provides differenttools to be used by the wine industry to authenticate wines and define ProtectedDesignation of Origin.