Tokay wines as scavengers of free radicals (an EPR study)

Wines are increasingly considered to be beneficial to health, so we expanded our previous investigations of red and white wines to Tokay wines, employing electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy (EPR). Four sources of free radicals were used in scavenging experiments: thermally decomposed radical initiators, K2S2O8 and 2,2′-azo-bis(2-methylpropionamidine) hydrochloride (AAPH), as well as the cation radical of 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenthiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) salt (ABTS), and the stable free radical 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH). The radical-scavenging abilities of 30 samples of Tokay wines from the Slovak region were compared with 10 samples of red and 10 samples of white wines originating from various regions. Tokay wines show a very good scavenging ability, positioned between white and red wines expressed as trolox equivalent antioxidant capacities (TEAC) with 14.8 ± 1.5 for red, 8.1 ± 3.4 Tokay and 3.3 ± 1.6 for white wines in mmol dm−3 wine.