Amphora Wines: To Pitch Or Not To Pitch

Abstract

Amphora wines are known in Portugal as Vinhos de Talha. In this technology, alcoholic fermentation takes place in clay vessels that traditionally were pitched inside using pine pitch. Vinhos de Talha has a distinctive sensorial profile, due to the ancestral technique of vinification. However nowadays, some clay vessels are impermeabilized with other materials than pitch, such as bee wax and mainly epoxy resins.

The present research is a first study to evaluate if different clay vessels impermeabilization materials impact the volatile profile of wines. Fot that objective, white wines were produced in clay vessels with different coatings: new pitch, old picth, epoxy resin, bee wax and no coating. The volatile composition was analyzed by headspace solid phase microextraction hyphenated with gas chromatography / mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC/MS).

A linear discriminant analysis shows that wines can be discriminated according to different clay vessels impermeabilization materials, being the most similar the ones from clay vessels with no coating and the ones from clay vessels with old pitch.