SUGAR ADULTERATIONS CONTROL IN CONCENTRATED RECTIFIED GRAPE MUSTS BY FINITE MIXTURE DISTRIBUTION ANALYSIS OF THE MYO-INOSITOL AND SCYLLO-INOSITOL CONTENT AND THE D H METHYL RATIO OF FERMENTATIVE ETHANOL/

Adulterations detection in concentrated rectified musts (CRM) could be strengthened by either making acceptance criteria capable of better r eflecting the features of genuine samples or employing additional trac ers suitable to ascertain the addition of exogenous sugars. In fact, t hanks to their purity, CRM are an ideal substrate for adulterations wi th sugars of plants other than grape, in particular beet; sucrose, abl e to emulate genuine samples. The present work shows that, moving from well-established standard methods like isotopic analysis of D/H and C -13/C-12 ratios and presence determination of myo-inositol, a better d efinition of genuineness characteristics could be achieved through a m ultivariate-approach integrated with the measurements of myo-inositol and its isomer scyllo-inositol, The separation between adulterated and genuine samples has been obtained by implementing a multivariate vers ion of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, and the estimates have been later used to derive a classification rule based on generali zed Mahalanobis distances. In this way it has been possible to highlig ht the effects of adulterations, in particular the dilution of polyalc ohols, and the shortcomings of the present-regulations, As a consequen ce, especially to solve the intermediate eases where attribution is no rmally difficult, we suggest a narrowing of the acceptance region by a true multiparametric approach integrated with scyllo-inositol.