AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF GEOGRAPHICAL TRACEABILITY MODEL OF OENOLOGICAL PRODUCTS

Notwithstanding urbanization and globalization, the strengthening consumers interests towards food with a well-defined geographical origin has been kept constant and features such as food authenticity and traceability are becoming peculiar to the entire mankind. This work summarizes the preliminary results of a long term research project [AGER project] focused on the development of geographical traceability models of two typical Italian oenological products, Lambrusco PDO and TRENTODOC, by means of primary and secondary indicators. In particular, this work reviews the adopted strategy and the obtained results as regard the potentiality of primary geographical tracers, i.e. strontium isotopic ratio, 87Sr/86Sr and elemental content. The innovation of the adopted strategy lies in the use of a systematic approach for developing a geographical traceability model, which requires a deep knowledge of the whole matrices that characterised the investigated systems, namely soils, vine branches, grape juices, intermediate products and wines. For these reasons, a statistically representative sampling for Modena and Trento districts was performed and primary indicators were monitored in all the investigated matrices obtaining isotopic maps able to highlight the geographical link between the investigated wines and their territory of provenance.