An authentication study on grappa spirit: the use of chemometrics to detect a food fraud

An authenticity study on Italian grape marc spirit was carried out by gas chromatography (GC) and chemometrics. A grape marc spirit produced in Italy takes the particular name of “grappa”, a product which has peculiar tradition and production in its country of origin. Therefore, the evaluation of its authenticity plays an important role for its consumption in Italy, as well as for its exportation all around the world. For the present work, 123 samples of grappa and several kinds of spirits were analyzed in their alcohol content by electronic densimetry, and in their volatile fraction by gas-chromatography with a flame-ionization detector. Part of these samples (94) was employed as a training set to compute a chemometric model (by linear discriminant analysis, LDA) and the other part (29 samples) was used as a test set to validate it. Finally, two grappa samples seized from the market by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency and considered suspicious due to their aroma reported as non-compliant were projected onto the LDA model to evaluate the compliance with the “grappa” class. A further one-class classification method by principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out to evaluate the compliance with other classes. Results showed that the suspicious samples were not recognized as belonging to any of the analyzed spirit classes, confirming the starting hypothesis that they could be grappa samples adulterated in some way.