The development of rapid, sensitive, and selective sensors for wine is of significant interest due to the potential commercial applications, especially if such sensors can accurately determine the type of wine, the geographic location of the wine, the year the wine was produced and/or the alcoholic content of the wine. One option for developing such sensors is to utilize the known ability of wine to form aggregates when mixed with other water-miscible solvents. Such aggregate formation is highly specific to the type of wine investigated, to the identity of the water-miscible solvent, and to the volume-to-volume ratios of the wine with the added solvent. Despite the fact that such aggregation is known, the resulting specific spectroscopic changes have not been used for the development of wine-related sensors to date. Reported herein are our efforts to accomplish precisely this objective: to discriminate between different wines based on changes in their photophysical properties that occur as a result of solvent- and wine-specific aggregation. We investigated a variety of red, white, and rose wines, and use statistical analysis of the resulting changes to achieve high levels of selectivity and accuracy in wine identification. Efforts toward the translation of these promising results into a practical detection device are also included herein.

Investigating the photophysical properties of wine aggregates for the development of region-specific wine sensors

ACS Fall 2021

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