Wine traceability by species and quantification of lanthanides atoms

Wine is a beverage widely spread all over the world. The annual world consumption of wine was estimated to be more than 250 million hectoliters by the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV). A problem that afflicts the agro-food industry, in particular the wine, is the falsification. The wine is a complex mixture of water and ethanol which contains organic and inorganic substances. By the mass spectrometer technique the wine is studied to get a correlation between the chemical elements, rare earths (lanthanides family), in the soil and in the plant itself. We analyzed several bio-matrices came from different Tuscany areas. Using crystalline structure containing lanthanides is possible to create a connection between soil and final product. We characterized different crystalline structures containing lanthanide atoms into the soil, must-grape and the wine by an innovative approach in this agro-sector. At the same time, an important aspect was to quantify the amounts of lanthanide atoms in the understudy bio-matrices. One possible way to perform such measurements is to resort to surface plasmon resonances (SPR) based nanostructures. These kind of optical sensors show remarkable performances for biological applications and seem particularly suitable for lanthanide atoms detection since their high-sensitivity, functionalization possibility, cheapness, portability and very low measurement time.