Comparison of wine aromas with different tannic content aged in French oak barrels

A method has been developed to determine the most significant volatiles of a wine aged in barrels: trans- and cis-whiskylactone, guaiacol, 4-ethylguaiacol, eugenol, 4-ethylphenol, vanillin, furfural and gamma-butyrolactone. This method consists in an extraction with dichloromethane, according to classical methods, but emulsion formation is avoided and the later analysis is carried out by thermal desorption-gas chromatography with mass spectrometric detection. This method is quite rapid and gives calibration graphs with linear regression coefficients between 0.97 and 0.99 for each compound and variation coefficients of variation < 10%. This method has been applied to three wines with different tannic content (free-run or base wine and two other from base wine by adding both enological tannin and its own press wine) aged 6 months in French oak barrels (Allier). Sensorial analyses were carried out by expert tasters. All results were used in discriminant analyses, but only the lactones and vanillin were necessary to properly classify all the wines according to tannic content. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.