Comparative study of aroma profile and phenolic content of Montepulciano monovarietal red wines from the Marches and Abruzzo Regions of Italy using HS-SPME-GC-MS and HPLC-MS

Montepulciano is one of the most famous and important red-berried grapes of Italy. This article presents and discusses a comparative study of aroma profile and phenolic content of the Montepulciano wine from the Marches and the Abruzzo regions. The volatile composition of wines was determined by using head- space solid phase microextraction (HS-SPME) coupled with gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). The PDMS fibre was chosen. The dominating esters in Montepulciano wines were ethyl hexa- noate, ethyl decanoate, and ethyl octanoate, whereas phenyl ethanol and 3-methyl-1-butanol were dom- inating alcohols. Phenolic compounds, namely gallic acid, p-coumaric acid, trans-ferulic acid, caffeic acid, trans-resvera- trol, (+)-catechin and ( )-epicatechin, were examined using HPLC–MS with direct injection of wine sam- ples. The total phenolic content of the analysed wines was in the range of 30.4–61.9 mg l 1. The presence of high amounts of esters seems to characterise the volatiles of Montepulciano wines from the Marches, whereas a high level of alcohols was found in Montepulciano wines from Abruzzo. Moreover, multivar- iate chemometric techniques, such as cluster analysis and principal component analysis, supported this thesis. Headspace solid phase microextraction and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry were used to analyse 20 commercial wine samples (Montepulciano monovarietal red wines) from the Marches (10 samples) and Abruzzo (10 samples).