Gas chromatographic organic acid profiling analysis of brandies and whiskeys for pattern recognition analysis.

An efficient gas chromatographic profiling and pattern recognition method is described for brandy and whiskey samples according to their organic acid contents. It involves solid-phase extraction of organic acids using Chromosorb P with subsequent conversion to stable tert-butyldimethylsilyl derivatives for the direct analysis by capillary column gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. A total of 12 organic acids were reproducibly identified in liquor samples (1 mL). When the GC profiles were simplified to their retention index spectra, characteristic patterns were obtained for each liquor sample as well as for each group average. Stepwise discriminant analysis provided star symbols characteristic for each liquor sample and group average. As expected, canonical discriminant analysis correctly classified 23 liquor samples studied into two groups of either brandy or whiskey.