Application of Chemometrics in the Determination of Spirits Authenticity

Abstract

The authenticity of food and food ingredients is a major problem today for the industry and manytechnologies have been applied to detect adulteration and contamination of food. This paper presentsresults of a study conducted at University College Dublin, Ireland, about vodka and whiskey andmixtures thereof, and another study in Cuba, at the Faculty of Chemical Engineering of the HigherPolytechnic Institute «Jose Antonio Echeverria», in collaboration with the Cuban Research Institute ofSugarcane Derivatives (ICIDCA), with historical data of Cuban rums. In the first study three techniqueswere used to determine whether pure drinks could be separated from mixtures: mid-infrared spectroscopywith a Fourier transform and Attenuated Total Reflectance cell, near infrared spectroscopy and ultravioletvisiblespectroscopy. In the second historical determinations of acidity, acetaldehyde, ethyl acetate,methanol, isoamyl alcohol, isobutanol, propanol and ethanol content of different types of Cuban agedrums to establish the possibility to differentiate the aged rum Vigía from the rest of Cuban aged onesby means of that analytic information. Unscramble software was used to apply Chemometrics. PrincipalComponent Analysis and various pretreatments were applied to data acquired experimentally toreduce the dispersion thereof. Near spectroscopy, Ultraviolet visible and Mid-infrared spectroscopyhave potential for the separation of pure whiskey and vodka from mixtures thereof The Cuban agedrums differ from Vigía aged rum successfully with the use of Principal Component Analysis applied tochemical data.