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This study summarizes the results obtained from a systematic and long-term project aimed at the development of tools to assess the provenance of food in the oenological sector. In particular, 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratios were measured on statistically representative set of soils, vine branches and wines sampled in the production district of Modena, worldwide known for the Lambrusco wines production. The obtained data were used to build strontium isotopic maps able to objectively support the Lambrusco PDO wines origin as well as other products of the Modena district. Finally, a strong relationship was found between the 87Sr/86Sr isotope ratios of soils and vine branches on a large scale, highlighting and confirming once more the idea that plants can also represent an optimal sampling device to support geographical traceability.

In the development of a geographical traceability model, it is necessary to understand if the value of the monitored indicators in a food is correlated to its origin or if it is also influenced by 'external factors' such as those coming from its production. In this study, a deeper investigation of the trend of direct geographical traceability indicators along the winemaking process of two traditional oenological products was carried out. Different processes were monitored, sampling each step of their production (grape juice, intermediate products and wine). The results related to the determinations of δ(18)O, (D/H)I, (D/H)II, δ(13)C, δ(15)N and (87)Sr/(86)Sr have been reported. Furthermore, correspondence with the isotopic values coming from the respective soil and vine-branch samples have been investigated as well, showing the optimal traceability power of the monitored geographical tracers.

Palaeoarchaean cherts preserve some of the most ancient traces of life, but such palaeobiological testament is rarely assimilated into fossil-calibrated ecosystem or biome models. Trace and rare earth element plus yttrium (REE+Y) compositions reliably decode the palaeodepositional settings of these cherts, and thus constrain the environments within which early microbial life flourished. Herein, we present a systematic study comparing bulk inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) of four cherts from the Barberton greenstone belt, South Africa (the 3.472 Ga Middle Maker horizon, 3.45 Ga Hooggenoeg H5c chert, 3.334 Ga Footbridge Chert and ~3.33 Ga Josefsdal Chert), with in situ laser ablation (LA) ICP-MS transects through multiple microbial laminations therein. In situ analyses can be interpreted in the framework of bulk analyses, correlating microbial biomes to their regional and local geochemical environments. Bulk ICP-MS analyses typically exhibit fractionated REE+Y patterns typical of anoxic hydrogenous sedimentation when normalised to Mud from Queensland (MUQ), supporting previous assertions that the Palaeoarchaean habitable realm was a hydrothermally influenced ocean. Suppressed La, Eu and Y anomalies, together with largely supra-chondritic Y/Ho ratios, however, indicate some degree of restriction from the open ocean and the influence of non-marine waters. In situ LA ICP-MS transects through microbial mat horizons are characterised by flat, LREE-enriched MUQ-normalised REE+Y patterns indicating strong non-marine influences from terrigenous, riverine fluids, although recurrent resurgences of marine REE+Y chemistry (increased Y/Ho ratios, La and Y anomalies) occur within the microbial laminations themselves. These findings show that widespread microbial life developed in semi-restricted basins with strong terrigenous, continental influences from mixed mafic and felsic erosion sources (estimated by trace element compositions and Cr/V versus Y/Ni trace element plots). Periodic seawater recharge into these basins generated disequilibrium conditions under which microbial life flourished. This systematic approach highlights both the development of emergent, volcanic, continental landmasses in the Palaeoarchaean, and their influence as loci for early microbial biomes, more than 100 Ma before the earliest evidence for large-scale terrestrial ecosystems. Throughout the Palaeoarchaean, semi-restricted, epicontinental basins represent an important, hitherto unrecognised, microbial habitat for some of the earliest photosynthetic life and may have been a precursor and contemporary to terrestrial microbial ecosystems, such as the lacustrine and riverine biomes identified in Mesoarchaean and Neoarchaean sequences. Understanding the distribution of Archaean life in terms of biomes should form a keystone of the strategy for Precambrian palaeoecology. The relative importance of biomes through time could, if accounting for the preservation potentials of individual palaeoenvironments, illuminate microbial evolutionary trajectories through the lens of environmental reconstruction.

Cooked must is the starting raw material used to produce Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale (ABT). It is obtained from grape musts that are condensed by a gentle simmering in uncovered pans over an open fire. Concentrations of fructose, glucose, furfural and 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) during must preparation were evaluated as quality indicator of the final product. High pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) technique was used for the determination of the analytes content in cooked musts sampled at different time during their preparation. Two varieties of grapes (Trebbiano Montanaro and Salamino), and different cooking apparatus were tested by using vats with different surface/volume ratio. The concentrations of the analytical species were found to be dependent on both the kind of grape and the cooking technology. Sugars concentration increases during cooking following almost a linear trend; on the contrary, furfural compounds, produced by monosaccharides degradation, significantly increase with an exponential trend only in the final step of the process. The analytical method gives good recovery values for all the investigated species, ranging from 91% to 104 %.

The effect of different dietary fat supplements: A, no added fat; B, 3% added lard and C, 3% added partially hydrogenated lard (PHL), were evaluated in dry cured Parma ham fat by determination of the lipid oxidation indices, R1 and R2, on a total of 30 Italian Landrace×Italian Large White pigs. Furthermore, correlations between lipid oxidation and calcium, magnesium, iron, zinc, copper and nickel concentrations, determined in Parma ham fat, was also investigated. Results highlighted a correlation between the oxidative state of Parma ham fat and the pigs' diet; in particular the addition of 3% PHL led to a more stable depot fat towards lipid oxidation compared to the addition of lard. Finally, Parma ham fat from treatment C showed higher concentrations of Ca (p0.01) and Mg (p0.05) compared to those from control, A, and treatment B groups. On the contrary, no significant differences were found for Fe, Zn, Cu and Ni.

Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale of Modena (ABTM) is a typical product (PDO denomination) of the province of Modena produced by cooked grape must which undergoes a long ageing period (at least 12 years) in series of wooden casks (batterie). The study of the transformations of this product during ageing is extremely relevant in order to control the authenticity of ABTM towards succedaneous products and mislabelling of age. This paper presents the results of the investigation of sugars and fixed organic acids in ABTM samples of different ages, coming from different batterie. The analytes were simultaneously determined by a gas chromatographic method optimised for this peculiar matrix. The method shows good separation and resolution of the investigated chemical species and allows their determination in the concentration ranges reported in brackets: malic (7.6-15.5 g kg(-1)), tartaric (4.0-9.7 g kg(-1)), citric (0.6-1.5 g kg(-1)) and succinic (0.36-0.62 g kg(-1)) acid and glucose (153-294 g kg(-1)), fructose (131-279 g kg(-1)), xylose (011-0.39 g kg(-1)), ribose (0.078-0.429 g kg(-1)), rhamnose (0.061-0.195 g kg(-1)), galactose (0.136-0.388 g kg(-1)), mannose (0.41-1.46 g kg(-1)), arabinose (0.33-1.00 g kg(-1)) and sucrose (0.46-6.84 g kg(-1)), with mean associated errors ranging from 5 to 19% depending on the analytes. Moreover, the recovery values are always satisfactory, being close to one for most of the analytes. Furthermore, in order to assess the degree of variability of the different analytes content with vinegar ageing and the similarity/dissimilarity among series of casks a three-way data analysis method (Tucker3) is proposed. The chemometric technique applied on the data set shows differences between the samples on the bases of their different ageing period, and between the batterie, which traditionally have an own peculiar production procedure.

A novel feature selection and classification algorithm (WPTER) based on the wavelet packet transform has been applied to the discrimination of balsamic vinegars, namely the typical made “Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena”, which gained the PDO denomination on the year 2000, from the industrial made “Aceto Balsamico” of the Modena district. All the samples have been characterized on the basis of the gas chromatographic (GC) profiles of the headspace (HS) volatile fraction, sampled by solid phase microextraction (SPME). Good discrimination between the two categories has been obtained both for the calibration and for the test set samples. GC-MS analysis allowed the identification of the peaks lying in the chromatographic regions selected by the algorithm, giving useful suggestions about the compounds which may be worth of further investigation in order to rationalize the chemical transformation occurring during the traditional making procedure. The proposed methodology seems very promising in authentication tasks, coupling some of the advantages of blind analysis with the possibility of acquiring chemical information, and giving, at the same time, very parsimonious multivariate classification models, which can be particularly suitable for data storage and handling.