Determination of Amino Acids in Chinese Rice Wine by Fourier Transform Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Chinese rice wine is abundant in amino acids. The possibility of quantitative detection of 16 free amino acids (aspartic acid, threonine, serine, glutamic acid, proline, glycine, alanine, valine, methionine, isoleucine, leucine, tyrosine, phenylalanine, lysine, histidine, and arginine) in Chinese rice wine by Fourier transform near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy was investigated for the first time in this study. A total of 98 samples from vintage 2007 rice wines with different aging times were analyzed by NIR spectroscopy in transmission mode. Calibration models were developed using partial least-squares regression (PLSR) with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) by postcolumn derivatization and diode array detection as a reference method. To validate the calibration models, full cross (leave-one-out) validation was employed. The results showed that the calibration statistics were good (r(cal) > 0.94) for all amino acids except proline, histidine, and arginine. The correlation coefficient in cross validation (r(cv)) was >0.81 for 12 amino acids. The residual predictive deviation (RPD) value obtained was >1.5 in all amino acids except proline and arginine, and it was >2.0 in 6 amino acids. The results obtained in this study indicated that NIR spectroscopy could be used as an easy, rapid, and novel tool to quantitatively predict free amino acids in Chinese rice wine without sophisticated methods.