A principal component analysis of transmission spectra of wine distillates

A chemometric method of decomposing multidimensional data into a small-sized space, the principal component method, has been applied to the transmission spectra of vintage Moldovan wine distillates. A sample of 42 distillates aged from four to 7 years from six producers has been used to show the possibility of identifying a producer in a two-dimensional space of principal components describing 94.5% of the data-matrix dispersion. Analysis of the loads into the first two principal components has shown that, in order to measure the optical characteristics of the samples under study using only two wavelengths, it is necessary to select 380 and 540 nm, instead of the standard 420 and 520 nm, to describe the variability of the distillates by one principal component or 370 and 520 nm to describe the variability by two principal components.