Two novel applications using a portable and wireless sensor system (e-nose) for the wine producing industry—The recognition and classification of musts coming from different grape ripening times and from different grape varieties—Are reported in this paper. These applications are very interesting because a lot of varieties of grapes produce musts with low and similar aromatic intensities so they are very difficult to distinguish using a sensory panel. Therefore the system could be used to monitor the ripening evolution of the different types of grapes and to assess some useful characteristics, such as the identification of the grape variety origin and to prediction of the wine quality. Ripening grade of collected samples have been also evaluated by classical analytical techniques, measuring physicochemical parameters, such as, pH, Brix, Total Acidity (TA) and Probable Grade Alcoholic (PGA). The measurements were carried out for two different harvests, using different red (Barbera, Petit Verdot, Tempranillo, and Touriga) and white (Malvar, Malvasía, Chenin Blanc, and Sauvignon Blanc) grape musts coming from the experimental cellar of the IMIDRA at Madrid. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) have been used to analyse the obtained data by e-nose. In addition, and the Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) method has been carried out to correlate the results obtained by both technologies.
Acknowledgments
This work is being supported by the Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA) of the Economía y Competitividad Ministry, under the project RTA2011-00095-C02-02. In addition, the authors thank Enrique Montero by performing daily the measurements with the electronic nose.
