Development of an irradiation equipment to accelerate the degradation of rosé wine in antique green and flint bottles

Abstract

Flint bottles make ros´e wines more attractive to the customers and, also, allow them to detect oxidation problems in the color of these wines. Nonetheless, transparent bottles do not protect wines from light. In this work, a device capable of accelerating the degradation of ros´e wines using W lamps radiation for short times of exposure has been developed. This equipment has been used to accelerate the color photodegradation of ros´e wines, allowing, thus, to identify which parameters can be used as markers of such degradation. The irradiation treatment applied to ros´e wines bottled in different types of glass (Flint and Antique Green glass) influenced all the samples. However, the wines treated in Flint bottles displayed more important color variations, especially in color intensity (CI) and hue, than the wines treated in Antique Green bottles. These changes entailed a quality loss of ros´e wines that can be appreciated with a naked eye. The yellow component of ros´e wines treated in transparent bottles increased the detriment of the red and blue ones. Therefore, color parameters such as CI and a*, together with the total anthocyanin content, seem to be good markers of the loss of quality of ros´e wines due to the light effects. The next step will be to find a physical, chemical or physical-chemical protection strategy that, when applied to transparent glass, allow to achieve the light-filtering properties of green glass bottles.