Determination of ethyl carbamate in alcoholic beverages: an interlaboratory study to compare HPLC-FLD with GC-MS methods.

An international interlaboratory study on the determination of ethyl carbamate in alcoholic beverages by a new HPLC-FLD and by the official GC-MS methods is presented. The aim of this study was to improve the knowledge about precision and accuracy parameters of the new method and to compare the performance of both HPLC and GC methods. Five different samples representing table wines, fortified wines (red and white), distilled spirits, and wine spirits were available for analysis by each participant. Despite the low number of participants (6), the results obtained by the laboratories using the HPLC-FLD method are comparable to those obtained by GC-MS methods. The present study emphasizes the possibility to use, as routine, a much simpler analytical method than the current reference method by GC-MS for ethyl carbamate determination in alcoholic beverages.