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Authentication and Discrimination of Whiskies of High Commercial Value by Pattern Recognition

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Abstract

An analytical method for a rapid and nondestructive classification and authentication of whiskies of high commercial value based on trademark and years of aging is presented. Molecular absorption spectroscopy was performed with a minimum manipulation of the sample. Different conditions previous to the chemometric analysis, such as dilution and pH effect, were studied. Fifteen commercial trademarks of whiskies with different years of aging were acquired from the local market. The pattern recognition was performed using principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and partial least square discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) to obtain models that allowed the classification and discrimination of whiskies based in trademarks and years of aging, respectively. Results show that by LDA, a mean of 99.15 % of samples was correctly classified according to trademark. On the other hand, by PLS-DA, a 100 % of correct classification and discrimination was achieved with several aging labels (6, 8, 12, and 15 years of aging).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the financial support from Univ. Nacional de San Luis, Univ. Nacional de La Pampa, and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Also, we want to thank Prof. Roberto Olsina (Univ. Nacional de San Luis) for providing The Unscrambler 6.11 software; and Facultad de Agronomía, Univ. Nacional de La Pampa, for providing the InfoStat software.

Conflict of Interest

Miguel Ángel Cantarelli declares that he has no conflict of interest. Silvana Mariela Azcarate declares that she has no conflict of interest. Marianela Savio declares that she has no conflict of interest. Eduardo Jorge Marchevsky declares that he has no conflict of interest. José Manuel Camiña declares that he has no conflict of interest. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Av. Uruguay 151, 6300, Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina

    Miguel Ángel Cantarelli, Silvana Mariela Azcarate, Marianela Savio & José Manuel Camiña

  2. Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra y Ambientales de La Pampa (INCITAP), Av. Uruguay 151, 6300, Santa Rosa, La Pampa, Argentina

    Miguel Ángel Cantarelli, Silvana Mariela Azcarate, Marianela Savio & José Manuel Camiña

  3. Instituto de Química San Luis (INQUISAL), Chacabuco y Pedernera, 5700, San Luis, Argentina

    Eduardo Jorge Marchevsky

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  1. Miguel Ángel Cantarelli
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  2. Silvana Mariela Azcarate
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  3. Marianela Savio
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  4. Eduardo Jorge Marchevsky
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  5. José Manuel Camiña
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Correspondence to Miguel Ángel Cantarelli.

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Cantarelli, M.Á., Azcarate, S.M., Savio, M. et al. Authentication and Discrimination of Whiskies of High Commercial Value by Pattern Recognition. Food Anal. Methods 8, 790–798 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-014-9958-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-014-9958-8

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