Characterization of wines using compositional profiles and chemometrics

This review discusses strategies for characterizing wines based on compositional profiles as sources of information. Contents of low molecular organic acids, volatile species, polyphenols, amino acids, biogenic amines and inorganic species seem to depend on climatic, agricultural and wine-making factors. As a result, compositional profiles of these families of natural wine components can be exploited as potential descriptors of wine and its quality. Most characterization studies rely on chemometrics to facilitate extraction of information. Cluster analysis, principal component analysis and related methods are currently used for discrimination, classification, modeling and correlation. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.