Analytical Techniques in the Wine Industry

The Montreal Gazette published an article about the use of analytical techniques in the wine industry. The author discusses the difference between "natural" wines and "industrial" wines that are created with a certain taste profile in mind and with the assistance of gas chromatography.

While the author laments that analytical techniques take away the unique, regional flavors of traditional wines, we are more interested in the subtext of what he is saying: Chromatography and mass spectroscopy have helped the wine industry produce great tasting wines at affordable prices. And that is something that should make any and every analytical scientist in the food and beverage industry proud.

In a LCGC North America article, Buglass and Lee described the applications of SPE and chiral ligand?exchange chromatographic method and a HPLC column-switching method to the analysis of the lactic acid enantiomer content of wine. The LCGC Application Notebook has featured several notes on the analysis of wine and alcohol such as a note on the determination of wine using a MS-based chemical sensor and a note on the determinations of alcohols and glycols in a wine sample using ion-exclusion chromatography (ICE) and pulsed amperometric detection (PAD).