If one is a big vineyard, one could hire a lab to analyze the grapes, although I tend to think it is smarter to visit the farmer. If you are a little guy, what hope do you have?
Chemists at Ege University in Turkey looked at grape authentication, and found a number of solutions that involve heavy instrumentation. The best is restriction length fragment polymorphism RLFP, which involves extracting DNA, and treating it with enzymes to cut it at determined points, and then analyzing the length with an agarose electrophorsis gel. There are more advanced versions of this technique. Most species identification is done this way, as are many paternity tests. It is hard to find a lab that will run samples, but one is Marin Biologics. There was a technique involving electrophoresis of the grape juice, which I found interesting since one can do it after pressing.
Having said all this, there is no good way to ensure that your grapes are what they say they are. The reputation of the vendor is important, but even the big vintners even buy mislabelled grapes from time-to-time. Gallo caught the scam. How many other scams go undetected?
My recommendation is to look at the grapes when buying, and pick ones that you like the appearance of. Don't pay too much because you can't ever be sure of what you are buying.
2 comments:
RLFP is a lame, non-quantitative technique. Also, it is not hard. Sometimes people do RFLPs to try to analyze a microbial population. You can see how that would get easily out of hand. Eukaryotes have such big genomes that I feel like analyzing them with RLFP would be a crapshoot.
If you say its easy, then maybe it is easy for you. My info was that it was hard find labs that did it for species identification.
What way is easier?
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