Valorisation of Grappa GI: new approaches for the protection of Made in Italy

Grappa is a Geographical Indication (GI) allowed by the EC Regulation no.110 of 2008 only for Italian-made grape marc spirit. To assess the authenticity of a beverage symbol of the Made in Italy, samples of Grappa GI and Italian spirits obtained from the distillation of other fruits or cereals were analysed. In our previously researches, results obtained with different instrumental techniques, such as GC-MS coupled with HS-SPME (head space-solid phase microextraction) and mid/near-infrared spectroscopies (MIR, NIR), were processed by means of different chemometric models (PLS-DA, SIMCA, SO-PLS-LDA, SO-CovSel-LDA), that allowed the differentiation of grappa samples from those of the “other distillates” with fruitful outcomes (Giannetti, 2019b). In this study, an HPLC-DAD method was developed to investigate the same set of distillates samples in order to characterize the Grappa IG also in terms of the antioxidant fraction. The PLS-DA chemometric approach, with data fusion strategy, correctly classified 71.4% of Grappa GI samples and SIMCA model the 57.2%. The results showed that a multi-platform investigation could help to protect the geographical indication products from possible label frauds, therefore, this approach could be used for control and protection of Made in Italy products.