Wine perception is very subjective and leads to many discussions, having multiple scales to assess wine, etc. It would be very beneficial to be able to objectively characterize wine taste. This is what we have performed by using proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) for monitoring on a commercial basis large amounts of wine samples in terms of quality and taste.<br/><br/>We considered a few elements of the standard form for wine assessment and made it objective based on PTR-MS and some basic chemical parameters (pH, total reducing sugars, ethanol, total acidity, etc.) measurements. In particular, we objectified the following parameters using PTR-MS measurements: flavour intensity, aroma&flavour characteristics, development, etc. Also, we considered off-notes presence in wines by setting up threshold values for a number of the off-note compounds (hexanal, 4-ethylphenol, ethyl acetate, etc.). In the presentation, we will discuss in more detail how these parameters have been quantified and also provide a few examples where differences were observed between the professional tasting panel observations and the measurements.<br/><br/>All in all, using PTR-MS measurements has been successfully applied to automatically process thousands of wine samples on a yearly basis and assess their quality and taste in an objective way.

Application of proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry (PTR-MS) for wine taste & quality analysis

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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