Furanic and Phenolic Composition of Cider Brandy. A Chemometric Study

A chemometric study based on furanic and polyphenolic substances is presented for typifying cider brandies of different ages obtained from ciders made from freshly pressed apple must and from reconstituted apple concentrate. Univariate treatment of the furfural content is sufficient for characterizing the brandies according to the raw material employed in their manufacture, but no single variable was found that by itself allowed correct discrimination of brandies on the basis of aging time in American oak barrels. Therefore, a number of pattern recognition techniques, namely linear discriminant analysis (LDA), K nearest-neighbor (KNN), soft independent modeling of class analogy (SIMCA), and partial least squares (PLS) were employed, which have allowed the typification of said spirits. Aromatic aldehydes, along with their oxidation products such as syringic acid, were the main modeling variables, which is in accordance with the model of lignin degradation by means of the mechanism of acid ethanolysis.