HR-NMR studies for the characterization of DOC Lambrusco wines of Modena

NMR spectroscopy is currently recognized as an important tool in food science and analysis for the authentication and quality control of foodstuff. The wine area is definitely one of those in which the NMR has proved most successful in recent years. High-resolution techniques were rather powerful tools for studying minor components of oenological products. Classical studies on oenological products are normally based on composition data obtained by various analytical techniques, however, since the quality and characteristics of a product are not the simple sum of individual chemical characteristics, NMR analysis with chemometric data analysis certainly is a useful tool in this regard. Over the past few years, many works based on proton NMR coupled with multivariate data analysis were been conducted concerning the study of the usability of HR-NMR as fingerprint analysis tool in oenology. Between them in particular different authors have proved the validity to use this technique as an indirect indicator of geographical traceability and demonstrated that HR-NMR is an extremely powerful method for the study of oenological product and wine in particular (Brescia et al., 2002; Viggiani and Castiglione, 2008). In this context, the present work, which is part of the extensive research project AGER (Agroalimentare e Ricerca: New analytical methodologies for geographical and varietal traceability of oenological products), aimed to use the HR-NMR techniques as molecular fingerprints in order to serve as indirect indicators of authenticity and quality control of several DOC Lambrusco wines of Modena (Lambrusco di Sorbara, Lambrusco Salamino di Santa Croce and Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro) provided by local producers joined to the research project AGER. The data obtained were coupled with chemometric analysis tools to effectively interpret the complex results collected from mono and bi-dimensional spectra (HR-1H-NMR, 1H-1H COSY, 1H-13C HMBC) acquired.