Characterization and determination of the geographical origin of wines. Part II: descriptive and inductive univariate statistics

Samples of commercial and authentic [authentic samples are samples produced under microvinification conditions (see Schlesier et al. Eur Food Res Technol, 2009 )] wines were collected from four countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Romania, and South Africa) and three different vintages. They were analyzed for 63 chemical parameters in the context of the European project “Establishing of a wine data bank for analytical parameters from Third Countries”. The aim of the project was to apply multivariate classification techniques to determine the country of origin of wines based on their chemical content. Moreover, it was important to evaluate whether models built for authentic samples can be used to discriminate commercial samples. Here we report on the descriptive and exploratory data analysis and discuss the univariate statistical results. These indicate that South African wines are easily discriminated from the other countries on the basis of a single isotopic ratio such as Ethanol(D/H) 1 . The discrimination of the European countries and especially the separation between Hungarian and Czech wines is less straightforward.