Qualitative Analysis of Age and Brand of Unblended Brandy by Electronic Nose

This paper reports the capability of electronic nose based on gas chromatograph (GC-Flash) in age identification and brand classification of brandy. Three different kinds of brandies by the static headspace sampling for the injection of the volatile compounds were analyzed. The data were disposed by multivariate data processing based on principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis (CA). The results show that PCA could identify the age as PC1 represented the raw information of age well; PCA on small difference ages of the samples could classify the brands of the samples. The CA would cluster samples by age through its analysis on the three different kinds of brandies respectively; The CA on all samples indicated that significant differences existed among different brands with age under 20 years and clustering process performed firstly in each group by age information and then clustering progressively by age among all groups. GC-Flash electronic nose can be applied to identify the brand and age of different brandies.