Abstract
The compositional authentication of wine is of great interest, as the geographic origin of the grapes is often associated with quality, uniqueness, and authenticity. Previous elemental fingerprinting studies mainly discriminated wines from different countries or regions within a country. Here, we report the use of element profiles to distinguish commercial Pinot noir wines from five sub-regional appellations or neighborhoods within one American viticultural area (AVA). Fifty-three single cultivar wines were collected over two harvests and analyzed using microwave plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (MP-AES) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Of 62 monitored elements that were quantified with fully validated methods, 24 and 32 elements differed significantly across the neighborhoods and vintages, respectively (p < 0.05). Targeted canonical variate analysis (CVA) explained 85–90% of the variance ratio across the two vintages, indicating persistent and stable elemental fingerprints of wines at a sub-regional level. A sixth, newly founded neighborhood was correctly grouped separately from the others using a Soft Independent Modeling of Class Analogy (SIMCA), indicating the potential of elemental fingerprints for wine authenticity.
Highlights
History has long-attributed wine sensory properties to the vineyard sites on which the grapes were grown
This study applied an elemental analysis to investigate the geographic authenticity of single cultivar (Pinot noir) of wines, originating from five neighborhoods within the Russian River Valley American viticultural area (AVA) in Northern California, over two vintages (2015 and 2017)
60 and 62 elements were quantified in the samples from the 2015 and 2017 harvests by microwave plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy (MP-AES) and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)
Summary
History has long-attributed wine sensory properties to the vineyard sites on which the grapes were grown. Multiple studies have successfully distinguished the geographic origin of wine, such as elemental differences in wines made from of grapes grown in different countries [13,21,24,31] or the distinctions in wines originating from different regions within countries such as Canada [27,32], Slovenia [19], Italy [20,33], Spain [24], Germany [14,34], Portugal [17,35], New Zealand [36], Australia [15], the Czech Republic [16,30], South Africa [23,37,38], Chile [18,39], Romania [25,29], China [40], Brazil [41], and the United States [42]. This study applied an elemental analysis to investigate the geographic authenticity of single cultivar (Pinot noir) of wines, originating from five neighborhoods within the Russian River Valley AVA in Northern California, over two vintages (2015 and 2017). Independent Modeling of Class Analogies (SIMCA) to further validate these elemental fingerprints
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