Natural or synthetic sweeteners, source of wine adulteration I. Studies on mediumsweet wine adulteration by adding natural sugars to marketable wines

Abstract

Medium sweet and sweet wines are obtained following a series of technological processes. By deviating from these processes and using various practices against the laws in force, sweet wines are likely to be adulterated. The detection of sweet wine adulteration is achieved by chemical polarimetric methods as well as by the TLC-Thin Layer Chromatography method. From the above mentioned methods we chose to detect natural sugars by TLCThin Layer Chromatography. In this paper we present the results of a case study on a lot of 16 samples, bought from the supermarket, composed of DOC – CMD medium sweet wines and table wines, bulk wine and wines in PET bottles. The objective of this study was to identify the flaws of the method for the detection of wine adulteration, and to find adulterated medium sweet wines on the market. Therefore, among the 16 studied wine samples we found two counterfeited medium sweet wine samples, in particular a wine obtained by adding sucrose, pointed out by a spot with an Rf of 0.125, specific for the sucrose standard, and a medium sweet wine obtained by adding an unidentified natural sugar source, with Rf of 0.67.