Characterisation and determination of the geographical origin of wines. Part I: overview

One of the most challenging analytical issues in terms of wine authenticity is the control of geographical origin. This question becomes more and more important in the current context of a global wine market. Single parameters are often not sufficient on their own to determine the product identity with respect to the wine labelling. Recent developments have shown that control is improved by application of multivariate statistical methods to a combination of composition and isotopic data. In the past years, the official European wine control bodies have been confronted with wines that have had to be judged as suspicious in terms of their sophisticated authenticity, falsifications which are not readily identifiable, especially as it regards the grape variety, and particularly highlighted here the geographical origin. To improve the measures of authenticity control, a project with the title “Establishing of a WINE Data Bank for analytical parameters for wines from Third countries (WINE-DB project, G6RD-CT-2001-00646-WINE-DB)” was initiated in 2002, funded by the European Commission within the fifth framework “Competitive and Sustainable Growth”. The project consortium of this multinational project was composed of official and private laboratories from the European Union, from new European member states and a group of university partners for the statistical evaluation. Within the framework of the WINE-DB project, commercial and authentic wines originating from new European member states (Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania) and from overseas countries (South Africa and Australia) are collected and analysed. More than 1,800 wines from three vintages were analysed. First, a sampling plan for each wine-producing country was developed for the authentic samples taking into account, the surface and the grape variety of wine in the respective country. This sampling plan was used for the commercial samples accordingly. A series of three publications was prepared covering the statistical approaches and the results obtained for authentication of wine. The actual one—Part I—provides an overview on the structure of the project, the developing of the sampling plan, the strategy of sample collection and the analytical scheme.