South Africa Wine Research Projects

3. OENOLOGY RESEARCH NEW PROJECT

3.1 WINE IMPROVEMENT

CRITICAL WINE ANALYSES FOR MONITORING AUTHENTICITY ADULTERATION – TOOLS FOR THE AUTHENTICATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN WINES

FShip P04000340 Dr Francois van Jaarsveld, ARC Infruitec-Nietvoorbij, Stellenbosch Project is co-funded by the ARC Infruitec-Nietvoorbij

Start date: 2024 Flagship Project

AIM AND INDUSTRY RELEVANCE: Due to the importance of wine exports for South Africa and potential international technical trade barriers, this project has been classified as a Flagship research project for South Africa Wine. Authenticity and the methods for determining fraud are two of the most critical issues in food quality control and safety today. With wine being one of the most adulterated foods in the world, authenticity determination is even more necessary. Sending wine samples for analysis to international laboratories is expensive. Local laboratories and instrumentation must be optimised to spare South African wineries this expense. Laboratories and instrumentation have been identified but require sample preparation methods and analytical protocol optimisation. This project aims to allow for additional analytical capacity and investigate the effectiveness of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) as a cost-effective screening tool for the authentication of wines, including all variations caused by grape cultivar, geographic location, and vintage. FT-IR and other methods in the authenticity studies will be compared and validated for their feasibility for the local authentication of South African wines. Data from both commercial and authentic wines will be evaluated to ascertain whether trade samples can complement authentic databases. Data will also be assessed to see whether models built for red wine samples can be used for white wine samples in authentication. Not only will analytical methods, data and databases be validated as originally proposed, but as part of this proposed study, the database will also be applied and validated against older databases.

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SOUTH AFRICA WINE RESEARCH 2024