Comparison between an electronic nose and a human sensory panel for wine compound detection

An electronic nose (e-nose) based on thin film semiconductor sensors has been developed in order to compare the performance with a trained human sensory panel. The panel had 25 members and was trained to detect concentration thresholds of some compounds of interest present in wine. Typical red wine compounds such as ethyl acetate and eugenol and white wine compounds such as hexanol and ethyl octanoate were measured at different concentrations starting from the detection threshold found in literature (in the micrograms to milligrams per liter range). Pattern recognition methods (PCA and neural networks) were used to process the data. The results showed that the performance of the e-nose for threshold detection was much better than the human panel. The compounds were detected by the e-nose at concentrations up to eight times lower than the panel.