CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In Argentina,commercial wine vinegar is a cheap agro-food product that does not presentexhaustive regulations. Thus, the production of high quality wine vinegars hasnot been exploited in this country, being a striking situation considering thatArgentina possess production regions recognized by their outstanding wines. Infact, Argentinean wine vinegars have not been studied yet. From technologicalpoint of view, there are two production methods. One of them is the submergedculture method, which is used in the industry for the rapid obtaining of lowquality vinegars. On the other hand, the traditional method, in which theacetic fermentation is carried out inside of wood barrels, which are filledwith wine to ferment giving rise to high quality vinegars more appreciated bytheir greater organoleptic complexity. The aim of this work is to carry out thefirst study of Argentinean wine vinegars through a chemical and sensorycharacterization in order to realize a national production evaluation. Inaddition, a comparison with well-recognized European wine vinegars has beenperformed to evaluate similarities and differences among them. A spectralcharacterization of 14 commercial Argentinean wine vinegars was performedthrough UV-Vis spectroscopy (280-650 nm) for determining samples basic characteristics.Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on the obtained data to detectgroupings, outliers and structures in the data. This analysis reveals a widevariability in the country production, which was also observed sensorially andvisually. In addition, PCA scores showed a clear difference between the most Argentineanvinegars and the European vinegars with protected designation of origin (PDO).However, four of them exhibit similarities. Thus, it was corroborated that theprincipal Argentinean wine vinegar production is from rapid obtaining and onlya few of them are elaborated from traditional method. In addition, a sensorypanel formed by 50 consumer judges accomplished sensory characterization. Forthat, triangular and preference ranking tests were realized. As a preliminaryresult, the consumer judges showed higher preferences (statisticallysignificant) toward the traditional vinegars when they were compared to therapid vinegars. Thus, a 91.7 % of the total of consumer judges preferred thetraditional vinegars in the ranking test. Remarking, all Argentinean vinegarsare commercialized in similar prizes, however, all of them are different intheir quality. Thus, a production of better quality could be encouragedin order to provide added value to the Argentinean vinegars.

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