Strontium isotopic signatures for authenticity and wine geographical assessment

The assessment of wine authenticity is of utmost importance in the current context of a growing market globalization. In the last years several studies were developed on the application of 87Sr/86Sr isotopic ratio for the evaluation of wine geographical origin, involving wine producing regions worldwide, evidencing its reliability as a provenance marker. Aspects such as 87Sr/86Sr relation with the vineyard substratum, analytical methodologies, and effect of technological processes have been addressed. Data has been obtained for different wine regions/PDO. Nevertheless, some important issues remain, such as the interpretation of the data from the soil (it is crucial to know the soil geochemistry), and the need for better understanding of the impacts of anthropogenic factors. Precise and accurate 87Sr/86Sr data is required for origin discrimination and analytical methods used should be officially recognized or validated in order to support comparison. Sr isotopic data can be used to build an authentic wine reference database (e.g. official or wine organization, PDO consortium), or to integrate a global database (e.g. EU wine databank). 87Sr/86Sr data combined with other discriminating parameters, namely elemental composition, can provide increasingly robust results for the identification of wine provenance. This work reviews the main aspects of the topic and includes recent research results obtained by the author’s team ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion