Keeping the track of quality: authentication and traceability studies on wine

The quality of a wine is one of the most valuable features in the consumer’s view. This is a consequence of a higher level of knowledge and culinary education among consumers: most people are now definitely ready to spend some more money to yield a higher quality product. At present, though, this feature seems not to be a matter of strict control from governments. In so many times laws have been violated that it is impossible not to see how inefficiently the present regulations on wine are working. The number of sophistication procedures is increasing constantly and becoming sophisticated and hard to recognize. More strict analytical controls should be developed and routinely used. An important concept in this field is traceability. In commodity economics this concept means “monitoring of goods fluxes from raw materials to the consumers’ table” but this process is only based on production of documentation, easily subjected to falsification. Here traceability is expressed in a different way than before: in the chemical sense, traceability means to individuate chemical markers to find a link among the geographical zone where a wine is made and the final product of winemaking process, i.e. wine itself. It is mandatory that analytical techniques should be used to fulfill this task. The condition for this to happen is that wines grown on different zones should carry with them a fingerprint from soil to the bottle to be expressed in chemical terms, be it isotope ratios or elemental distributions. As long as this fingerprint is not altered along the whole winemaking process, its recognition could allow one to check whether a wine had been effectively produced in a certain area. Another key feature in wine research is authentication, a concept expressing the possibility to identify and discriminate true samples from false samples. This concept, though not being a synonym of traceability, points to the same direction, i.e. quality. Among the different techniques available for wine analysis and control, two seem to be highly promising for fingerprint recognition and authentication: isotope ratio – MS for determination of light and heavy elements and ICP-MS for determination of trace and ultra-trace concentrations of elements acting as markers, with particular focus devoted to lanthanides. An increasing amount of publications is being devoted in the last years to the application of these techniques to wine authentication and traceability, a review of state-of-the-art of which is the task of the present work.