Ricerc@Sapienza

In this paper, we report a simple method for the determination of quercetin, a typical antioxidant compound ubiquitously present in vegetable food products including grapes and wine. To this aim, 12 Italian wines were analyzed and the amount of quercetin was determined by high-performance liquid chromatography with ultraviolet detector. To reduce the interferences, a minimal sample preparation was performed on solid phase cartridge, then the samples were eluted through a narrow bore C18 column under gradient elution in less than 25 min. Nine wines were red and three white.

The potential of Fourier Transform Near-Infrared spectroscopy (FT-NIR) and High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with Diode-Array Detection (HPLC-DAD) in combination with multivariate data analysis was examined to classify 70 honey samples (belonging to 7 different varieties) according to their botanical origin. In the first part of the work, classification was achieved by applying PLS-DA to the individual data blocks: this approach led to promising results from the prediction point of view.