The Verification of the Usefulness of Electronic Nose Based on Ultra-Fast Gas Chromatography and Four Different Chemometric Methods for Rapid Analysis of Spirit Beverages

Spirit beverages are a diverse group of foodstuffs. They are very often counterfeited which cause the appearance of low quality products or wrongly labelled products on the market. It is important to find a proper quality control and botanical origin method enabling the same time preliminary check of the composition of investigated samples, which was the main goal of this work. For this purpose, the usefulness of electronic nose based on ultra-fast gas chromatography (fast GC e-nose) was verified. A set of 24 samples of raw spirits, 33 samples of vodkas, and 8 samples of whisky were analysed by fast GC e-nose. Four data analysis methods were used. The PCA was applied for the visualization of dataset, observation of the variation inside groups of samples, and selection of variables for the other three statistical methods. The SQC method was utilized to compare the quality of the samples. Both the DFA and SIMCA data analysis methods were used for discrimination of vodka, whisky, and spirits samples. The fast GC e-nose combined with four statistical methods can be used for rapid discrimination of raw spirits, vodkas, and whisky and in the same for preliminary determination of the composition of investigated samples.