Argentinean wine vinegars, sensory and spectroscopic characterization: a comparative study with European wine vinegars

AZCARATE S.M.; AZCARATE ROSANA VALERIA; RÍOS-REINA R.; CALLEJÓN R.; CAMIÑA, JOSÉ M.

Cordoba

Congreso; VII Congreso Internacional de Ciencia y Tecnología de Alimentos (CICYTAC 2018); 2018

In Argentine, commercial wine vinegar is a cheap agro-food product that does not present exhaustive regulations. Thus, the production of high quality wine vinegars has not been exploited in this country, being a striking situation considering that Argentina possess production regions recognized by their outstanding wines. In fact, Argentinean wine vinegars have not been studied yet. From technological point of view, there are two production methods. One of them is the submerged culture method, which is used in the industry for the rapid obtaining of low quality vinegars. On the other hand, the traditional method, in which the acetic fermentation is carried out inside of wood barrels, which are filled with wine to ferment giving rise to high quality vinegars more appreciated by their greater organoleptic complexity. The aim of this work is to carry out the first study of Argentinean wine vinegars through a chemical and sensory characterization in order to realize a national production evaluation. In addition, a comparison with well-recognized European wine vinegars has been performed to evaluate similarities and differences among them. A spectral characterization of 14 commercial Argentinean wine vinegars was performed through UV-Vis spectroscopy (280-650 nm) for determining samples basic characteristics. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on the obtained data to detect groupings, outliers and structures in the data. This analysis reveals a wide variability in the country production, which was also observed sensorially and visually. In addition, PCA scores showed a clear difference between the most Argentinean vinegars and the European vinegars with protected designation of origin (PDO). However, four of them exhibit similarities. Thus, it was corroborated that the principal Argentinean wine vinegar production is from rapid obtaining and only a few of them are elaborated from traditional method. In addition, a sensory panel formed by 50 consumer judges accomplished sensory characterization. For that, triangular and ordering preference tests were realized in order. As a preliminary result, the consumer judges showed higher preferences (statistically significant) toward the traditional vinegars when they were compared to the rapid vinegars. Thus, a 91.7 % of the total of consumer judges preferred the traditional vinegars in the ordering test. Remarking, all Argentinean vinegars are commercialized in similar prizes however; all them are different in their quality. Thus, a production of better quality could be encouraged in order to provide added value to the Argentinean vinegars