Abstract
The quality of fruit based spirits varies year to year; therefore, the identification of the vintage of a distilled alcoholic beverage is necessary, but requires highly sensitive analytics. The interpretation of the gathered data requires a well-adapted chemometric method. In this study, Hungarian apple, sour cherry and plum distillates (pálinka’s) from different vintages were analyzed, classified and identified using volatile composition analyzed by GC-MS. The fruit’s origin, fermentation technique and distillation were the same at all the fruits; the only differences in the samples were their vintages (2010, 2011 and 2012). Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was applied for classification and components’ identification related to the vintage effect. The samples were successfully classified (correct classification rate ranging from 75 to 100%), three components are found to be related to the vintage effect regardless the fruit type: propanol, butanol and ethyl-propionate. GC-MS data proved to be a promising tool for classification of fruit distillate vintages.
Highlights
The vintage of an alcoholic beverage is one of the markers which helps one determine whether a beverage will meet one’s expectations or not
It is clearly shown that while apple has only a small fraction of compounds differing in the different years, sour cherry and plum had numerous which indicates that apple is a less vintage sensitive fruit
By analyzing the relation of the discriminant variables (LD12) with the original gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC-MS) component concentrations using the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) coefficients we found that the discrimination among the different vintages relates to 2-methyl-1-butanol, 2-methylbutyl acetate, 3-methyl-butyl acetate and methyl-butyl acetates
Summary
The vintage of an alcoholic beverage is one of the markers which helps one determine whether a beverage will meet one’s expectations or not. In the case of fruit/grape based alcoholic beverages, the ’vintage’ refers to the year the fruits are harvested. Fruitbased alcoholic beverages, containing mostly fruit related compounds, affect the aroma profile in proportion to the amount of the compounds. The aroma profile changes year by year depending on weather patterns which the cultivation sites are exposed to. Aroma compounds are heavily influenced by the climate [5], the climate variations between different harvests are responsible for the vintage effect at the wines [6, 7]. In literature, limited publication could be found about the effect of yearly weather patterns on the quality of the fermented fruit based spirits
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