Helene Hopfer, Courtney Tanabe, Joshua Godshaw, Jenny Nelson, Susan Ebeler, Robert Coleman and Roger Boulton*  
*Department of Viticulture and Enology, University of California,
Davis, CA 95616 (rbboulton@ucdavis.edu)

Multi-element profiling of macro-, micro-, and trace elements in wine has been proposed as a means of establishing authenticity and typicity. Previous studies considered differences among countries and wine regions, but there is very limited information for wines made from grapes grown within the same wine region, let alone single-cultivar wines from within a wine district. Twenty-five Pinot noir wines from six districts within a California AVA were analyzed for 49 elements using a combination of inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and microwave plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (MP-AES) instrumentation. All wines were from the 2016 vintage and were analyzed after ~six months of aging, with little or no barrel contact and not fined or treated for physical instabilities. Canonical variance mapping using the single elements and various ratios of elements revealed complete separation of the wines into five groups based on the district and tight clustering of the wines from each district within its group. The complete resolution is achieved with the first two factors, which together account for 87% of the total variance. The separation between district groups is three to five times the dimension of the district groups. The method has potential applications in tracing authenticity and understanding the contributions of site to wine elemental composition.

Funding Support: Food Safety and Measurement Facility at UC Davis, Stephen Sinclair Scott Endowment in Viticulture and Enology