ABSTRACT
The quality of any food is intrinsically dependent upon the quality and composition of the raw materials and processes used to produce it. This chapter presents some applications of infrared spectroscopy for the analysis of alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, and distillates. Numerous applications on the use of both near-infrared (NIR) and mid-infrared spectroscopy have been found in the literature to predict several chemical parameters in alcoholic beverages. The potential of NIR technology to analyze alcohol in beer was first demonstrated by Coventry and Hunston using transflectance in the wavelength range between 1100 and 2500 nm. Much of the NIR applications in the wine industry have concentrated on the measurement of ethanol with dedicated NIR-based alcohol analyzers being found in most of the wine laboratories around the world. Grape spirit is produced by the distillation of wine or wine/grape-derived process waste and is used in the production of fortified wines.
