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.
Authors: Cabrtia Maria João1, Pereira Ana1, Martins Nuno1, Garcia Raquel1 and Gomes da Silva Marco2
1MED – Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment and Development, Departamento de Fitotecnia, Escola de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade de Évora
2LAQV, REQUIMTE, Departamento de Química, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
*corresponding author: mjbc@uevora.pt
Keywords: Vinhos de Talha; Volatile profiling; HS-SPME; GC/MS
