Ricerc@Sapienza

An analytical approach including Panel Test, Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry (IRMS)
and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was proposed to characterize Italian “Colline
Pontine” PDO olive oils (40 samples) of two consecutive crop years. Our approach has evidenced
the high quality of these olive oils. Only 6 of 40 olive oils samples were defined as “defective” by the
official Panel Test due to the detection of negative sensory attributes. The low variability of isotopic
data monitored by IRMS confirmed that the olive oil samples all came from a limited geographical
area. NMR spectra did not evidence any chemical composition anomaly in the investigated samples.
In order to assess the influence of harvesting year over the olive oil chemical composition, the NMR
analysis was extended to other 22 olive oil samples of a third harvesting year. NMR data were
submitted to two different statistical methods, namely, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and principal
component analysis (PCA) allowing olive oils of three consecutive harvesting years to be grouped.