Wine quality

The wine trade is one of the most relevant voices in the food sector. To date, the attention paid by modern consumers towards food quality has raised interest in defining quality markers for wine and in preventing wine fraud. Proteins are minor components of both white and red wines, with little nutritional relevance, but they have an impressive impact on its quality and safety. The present chapter exhaustively summarizes the state of the art of wine proteomics, including several very recent reports on the study of contaminating proteins in wines. The issues include (1) the reliable quantification of total proteins in white and red wines, (2) the methods applied to wine protein characterization, (3) the investigation of wine protein origin, (4) the role of specific wine proteins in haze formation, (5) the link between some wine proteins and foam formation and stability in sparkling wines, and (6) the use of wine proteomics as a tool for traceability.