Evaluation of similarities between natural and accelerated browning of fino sherry wines by chemometric techniques

Abstract

A new accelerated browning method that allows the prediction of the evolution of white wine was developed. The determination of similarities between natural browning phenomena and accelerated browning is a critical point for the introduction of this new method for control purposes. Since phenolic compounds are the main substances responsible for browning, their evolution in both the natural process and accelerated browning was investigated. HPLC is used to quantify the phenolic composition and about 40 peaks are obtained for each analysis. Since the amount of information obtained is fairly large, chemometric techniques (cluster analysis of cases and principal component analysis) were used to analyse the evolution of phenolic compounds. It was demonstrated that the effects of accelerated browning on samples of wine have the same characteristics as natural browning.