Classification of wines according to their production regions with the contained trace elements using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has been applied to classify French wines according to their production regions. The use of the surface-assisted (or surface-enhanced) sample preparation method enabled a sub-ppm limit of detection (LOD), which led to the detection and identification of at least 22 metal and nonmetal elements in a typical wine sample including majors, minors and traces. An ensemble of 29 bottles of French wines, either red or white wines, from five production regions, Alsace, Bourgogne, Beaujolais, Bordeaux and Languedoc, was analyzed together with a wine from California, considered as an outlier. A non-supervised classification model based on principal component analysis (PCA) was first developed for the classification. The results showed a limited separation power of the model, which however allowed, in a step by step approach, to understand the physical reasons behind each step of sample separation and especially to observe the influence of the matrix effect in the sample classification. A supervised classification model was then developed based on random forest (RF), which is in addition a nonlinear algorithm. The obtained classification results were satisfactory with, when the parameters of the model were optimized, a classification accuracy of 100% for the tested samples. We especially discuss in the paper, the effect of spectrum normalization with an internal reference, the choice of input variables for the classification models and the optimization of parameters for the developed classification models.