Analysis of wines by ICP-MS:: Is the pattern of the rare earth elements a reliable fingerprint for the provenance?

In a comparative analysis of young and finished product wines by semi-quantitative ICP-MS, a striking difference was observed: finished products exhibited significant concentrations of the rare earth elements whereas the concentrations in young wines which had not been subdued to any treatment after their initial preparation from the grapes were below the determination limits with a quadrupole instrument and could only be determined with a magnetic field instrument operated at a low mass resolution (R = 300). The reason was found in contamination from bentonites as usually applied for the purification of wines from tarnishing components such as proteins. Therefore, bentonites of different origin were extracted with a reference wine, and an increase of the rare earth element concentrations by more than one order of magnitude was observed in the extracts. The investigation leads to the conclusion that the concentration pattern of the rare earth elements can be strongly affected by the wine producing process and therefore is not generally suitable as a fingerprint for the provenance of wines.