Fast determination of lactic, succinic, malic, tartaric, shikimic, and citric acids in red Vranec wines by CZE-ESI-QTOF-MS.

A fast and simple method with CZE coupled to ESI/QTOF-MS was optimized and validated for quantitative determination of organic acids (lactic acid, succinic acid, malic acid, tartaric acid, shikimic acid, and citric acid) in red wines. The BGE was ammonium acetate and the separation of the analytes was performed in a polybrene-coated capillary in the presence of EOF. The sample preparation included dilution and filtration of the wine. The method showed satisfactory performance characteristics: good linearity for each organic acid, with correlation coefficients ranging from r2  = 0.9902 (shikimic acid) to r2  = 0.9990 (tartaric acid). The limit of quantification was between 0.0034 mM (for shikimic acid) and 0.107 mM (for citric acid), and the recovery data fell between 95.8% (malic acid) and 102.7% (lactic acid); the total run time was less than 4 min. The RSD values for the interday repeatability and intraday reproducibility were between 3.44 and 9.50%, and between 1.75 and 8.29%, respectively. Seventeen Macedonian red Vranec wines were studied demonstrating a wide variation in the organic acids' concentration, which should be most probably due to the variation of the climate conditions in the vine areas.