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In recent years, food authentication has acquired significant importance due to the increase in the incidence of fraud and counterfeiting. Alcoholic beverages are among the food products most susceptible to these kinds of illicit practices due to their high commercial value. In the EU alone, there are 47 categories of spirit drinks and approximately 250 geographical indications (GIs). The production and labeling of GIs are strictly regulated, and developing analytical procedures that can ensure compliance with the legislation is essential to guarantee the typicality of these products. The aim of this review is to summarize the most relevant analytical techniques used for the authentication and quality control of two well-renowned GIs: "Grappa" and wine brandy. It considers the last decade of advancements for both conventional targeted chromatographic techniques and less common methods mainly based on spectrometry coupled with chemometrics for quick and non-destructive discrimination of samples. Novel approaches and future perspectives are also highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An authenticity study on Italian grape marc spirit was carried out by gas chromatography (GC) and chemometrics. A grape marc spirit produced in Italy takes the particular name of "grappa", a product which has peculiar tradition and production in its country of origin. Therefore, the evaluation of its authenticity plays an important role for its consumption in Italy, as well as for its exportation all around the world. For the present work, 123 samples of grappa and several kinds of spirits were analyzed in their alcohol content by electronic densimetry, and in their volatile fraction by gas-chromatography with a flame-ionization detector. Part of these samples (94) was employed as a training set to compute a chemometric model (by linear discriminant analysis, LDA) and the other part (29 samples) was used as a test set to validate it. Finally, two grappa samples seized from the market by the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency and considered suspicious due to their aroma reported as non-compliant were projected onto the LDA model to evaluate the compliance with the "grappa" class. A further one-class classification method by principal component analysis (PCA) was carried out to evaluate the compliance with other classes. Results showed that the suspicious samples were not recognized as belonging to any of the analyzed spirit classes, confirming the starting hypothesis that they could be grappa samples adulterated in some way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]