High-Performance Liquid Chromatography Analysis of Amines in Must and Wine: A Review

There are three main reasons that lead to the need of controlling the amount of biogenic amines in must and wine: the economic concern, the presence of intoxications, and the existence of people with intolerance to these compounds. The separation and quantification of amines is normally made by chromatographic techniques. This review contains descriptions about some of these techniques, as well as different derivatizing agents to quantify biogenic amines in wine. Although high-performance liquid chromatography-fluorescence is the more widely used technique, there are other techniques such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, with which more sensitive results can be obtained, or capillary electrophoresis, which provides faster results.