Identification of typical aromas of red wines with thin film sensors combined with pattern recognition techniques

This paper reports the use of an electronic nose based on tin dioxide multisensor array and two different sampling methods (static headspace and purge and trap) for recognition of some typical aromas (clove, vanilla, coconut, green belt pepper, toasted, peach, anisette and mint) in red wine. The multisensor array is constituted by 16 thin film tin oxide sensors, some of them doped with chromium and indium either as surface or intermediate layer. Multivariate analysis, including linear techniques as principal component analysis (PCA) and nonlinear techniques as probabilistic neural networks (PNN), has been used to identify and classify the main aroma of the wine.