Volatile Profile in Greek Grape Marc Spirits with HS-SPME-GC-MS and Chemometrics: Evaluation of Terroir Impact

[Image: see text] Greek grape marc spirits, although being traditional products, have lately attracted increasing attention as a revisited spirit product category. A headspace solid-phase microextraction coupled to the gas chromatography–mass spectrometry method was optimized in order to determine the volatile composition of 39 samples of grape marc spirits from eight major geographical regions of Greece and 4 protected designations of origin (PDOs). This untargeted analysis approach yielded the identification and quantification of 200 volatiles characterizing those products. Principal component analysis and partial least-squares-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) combined with the volatile matrix were further employed to identify terroir denomination. Initial results showed a clear separation of the PDO products from Tyrnavos from the rest. Variable importance in projection data pretreatment was further adopted, and with 31 volatiles subsequently used with PLS-DA, products were correctly classified according to region of origin at 76.92% and for 3 out of 4 PDO denominations at 100%.