CANBERRA, Nov. 6 (Xinhua) -- Australian researchers have developed a quick and effective method of authenticating wine, potentially putting an end to wine fraud.
In a study published on Thursday, a team from the University of Adelaide revealed that it identified wines from three regions in Australia and France with 100 percent accuracy using technology that analyzes the fluorescence of molecules.
"Wine fraud is a significant problem for the global wine industry, given a yearly economic impact within Australia alone estimated at several hundred million dollars, and globally thought to be in the billions of dollars," Ruchira Ranaweera, the lead author of the study from the university's Waite Research Institute, said in a media release.
"Wine authentication can help to avoid any uncertainty around wine labeling according to origin, variety, or vintage. The application of a relatively simple technique like this could be adapted for use in the supply chain as a robust method for authentication or detection of adulterated wines.
The author said that this method provided a "fingerprint" of the samples according to the presence of fluorophoric or light-emitting compounds.
"When used in combination with a robust data analysis using a particular machine learning algorithm, it is proving to be a powerful technique for authentication," she said.
Researchers compared the new method with an existing approach to authentication which measures elements in wine samples using "inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry" (ICP-MS).
They found that the "fingerprint" method was able to allocate every wine to the correct region in Australia or France while ICP-MS did not.
David Jeffery, associate professor from the Waite Research Institute, said that the team was now working on identifying specific chemical markers that help discriminate between wine regions.
"Other than coming up with a robust method for authenticity testing, we are hoping to use the chemical information obtained from fluorescence data to identify the molecules that are differentiating the wines from the different regions," he said.
"This may help with regional branding, by understanding how their wines' characteristics are influenced by the region and how they differ from other regions." Enditem
