Promising bioanalytical approaches to wine analysis

The fermented foods and beverages industry needs effective manufacturing technologies and reliable methods of analysis in order to ensure the safety and high quality of the final products. The following substances must be controlled in the wine industry: basic components (ethanol, sugar, and glycerol), aromatic volatile organic chemicals, dangerous products (impurities and carcinogenic metabolites of the beverage process) as well as toxic ions of heavy and transition metals. A wide range of traditional and advanced analytical methods is used in wine science and wineries for monitoring organic and inorganic chemicals in wines. However, they all have certain disadvantages. Well-known physicochemical methods usually lack precision, sensitivity, and selectivity. Modern high-throughput approaches require special skills, are time-consuming, expensive, and often also have low selectivity. This situation necessitates further development of highly selective and sensitive methods for monitoring important analytes in the winemaking and food industries. Simple and low-cost enzymatic approaches can be promising for monitoring chemicals (enzymes substrates and their cofactors) in routine assays, not only for the industrial giants, but also for small wineries. This chapter includes a description of modern quantitative assay methods for important components of wines and novel highly selective enzymatic approaches, as well as the authors’ research results, conclusions, and future prospects.