The Application of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Chemometrics to Classify Shaoxing Wines from Different Breweries

Abstract

Shaoxing rice wine (also called Shaoxing wine) is a kind of Chinese rice wine popular in China, and the popularity of Shaoxing wine from different breweries varies, which causes fraud and adulteration. So it is significant to find a technique to discriminate Shaoxing wines for protecting the interests of consumers and breweries. In this article, 116 samples of Shaoxing rice wines, collected from three breweries (guyuelongshan, kuaijishan, and pagoda) and from three brewing years (2002, 2004, and 2004-2006) were analyzed by near-infrared transmission spectroscopy between 800 and 2500 nm. The spectral differences were studied by principal components analysis (PCA), and classifications, according to brand, were carried out by discriminant analysis (DA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLSDA). The DA classification model achieved a total accuracy of 93.1% when used to predict the brand of the validation set samples. A better result, correctly classifying all of the three kinds of Shaoxing wine up to 100%, was obtained by the PLSDA model. The work reported here is a feasibility study and requires further development with considerably more samples of different brands. Further studies are needed in order to improve the accuracy and robustness, and to extend the discrimination to other Chinese rice wine varieties or brands.