Volatile profile of two monovarietal white wines under different antioxidant environments during storage in bottle

The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) formed during winemaking can be modulated by several additives, namely by the use of sulphur dioxide (SO2) which has been well-accepted on winemaking as a preservative agent. However, some drawbacks associated with SO2 wine application led to the need to reduce or replace its use. In this work, VOCs profile after storage in bottle under different antioxidant conditions of two Portuguese monovarietal wines (‘Arinto’ and ‘Síria’) was studied. Wines were obtained by different winemaking environments (0, 50, 100 mg/L of SO2 and 100 mg/L ascorbic acid for ‘Síria’ and 15, 30, 45 mg/L of SO2 and 100 mg/L of ascorbic acid for ‘Arinto’ both with and without bentonite). After alcoholic fermentation, a second SO2 treatment was applied: 0 and 60 mg/L of SO2 to ‘Arinto’ wines and 30 and 60 mg/L of SO2 to ‘Síria’ wines. Wines were kept over lees for three months, bottled and analysed after three months in bottle. The VOCs present were analysed by HS-SPME-GC/MS six months after fermentation. The maturation conditions did not influence the evolution of free and total SO2. Regarding the VOCs profile evolution, the ANOVA analysis showed that esters are the most important group, presenting significant differences among samples. Through the PCA analysis, using wines after fermentation as reference, 74.13 % and 54.92 % of the variation were explained by the first two principal components for ‘Arinto’ and ‘Síria’, respectively. VOCs profile evolution of wines seems to be mainly influenced by the fermentation conditions.