Chemometrics on microchips: Towards the classification of wines

The coupling of a capillary electrophoresis (CE) microchip with electrochemical detection with a chemometric approach was used for the classification of wines. Cabernet Sauvignon wine samples from 3 different geographical regions were used for verifying the discriminating power of the microchip electrophoretic technique using high separation voltage (3000 V) with analysis time of only 60 seconds. Electrophoretic data were transformed into initial 14 variables, concerning peak's area and peak's height. Principal component analysis was applied to optimize the information given by the electrophoretic data sets. Results of classification using LDA and CART were promising and the preliminary model was able to classify samples on the basis of their geographical origin. While the coupling of microchips with chemometrics approaches is illustrated for a former tentative of the classification of wines it could be readily extended to a wide range of other important applications.