Abstract
In this study, we compare the stable isotope composition of oxygen and carbon of wines from four Central and Southeastern European countries and from Argentina to study the similarities and differences in the isotope signatures and, thus, the potential of differentiation of the various wine-growing countries. We observe similar trends for wines from Austria, Slovenia, and Romania with respect to the vintages 2008 and 2009, which are absent in the Montenegrin and Argentinean samples. It is speculated that the weather develops similarly for Austria, Slovenia, and Romania, as these countries are positioned at a similar latitude and not too far away from each other (general central and eastern European weather situation), whereas Montenegro is not influenced by the latter being situated farther south and dominantly influenced by the Adriatic Sea. Investigations on further vintages are needed to test this assumption.
Highlights
In the last century, several wine scandals occurred in the 70’s and 80’s in Europe, a few of them even had lethal consequences
Despite the rather small size of the entire wine-growing area in Austria, the wine isotope values are very heterogeneous as the wine-producing regions in Austria are situated north, east, and south of the Eastern Alps, which have a strong influence on the regional weather
It is to be expected that most Austrian wines of these years can be assigned to the respective year as demonstrated by the statistical evaluation, where almost 70% of the vintages were correctly classified (Supplementary Material 3)
Summary
Several wine scandals occurred in the 70’s and 80’s in Europe, a few of them even had lethal consequences (https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/tod-in-italiena-7490f6a9-0002-0001-0000-000013519771?context=issue). The investigation of the geographic origin of wine by analyzing the isotope pattern is founded on the idea that every region and locality has unique environmental conditions. Wine samples from Austria, Slovenia, Romania, Montenegro, and Argentina (Figure 1) have been collected, processed, and analyzed for their carbon and oxygen isotope values. Wine samples of the years 2008 and 2009 from Austria, Slovenia, Romania, Montenegro, and Argentina have been collected (Table 1) and analyzed As some of these samples (from Austria and Slovenia) are the official ones for the EU wine database, which were harvested in selected vineyards by governmental collectors and vinified applying a standardized protocol, an assignment to a certain area, locality, or winery was not done to retain data confidentiality. Outlier test was performed using the Grubbs test by the Graphpad Software (graphpad.com; USA) and orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLSDA) by the SIMCA (https://www.sartorius.com/en/products/ process-analytical-technology/data-analytics-software/mvdasoftware/simca; Germany)
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