Geographical origin discrimination of wine has become of primary importance both for producers and consumers. The link between the wine and its geographical origin can be made by analysing organic compounds but they may turn out to be unstable over the time. An other possibility involves the measurement of isotopic ratios of non-traditional elements (Sr, Pb and B) but this method is long and expensive. The measurement of the total element contents appears as an interesting alternative providing that the precision of this measurement is low enough.

A new method has therefore been developed to measure a set of 23 elements (major and trace elements representing a mixture of markers of soils, agricultural practices and anthropogenic contaminations) in wine in a highly precise way. It involves the use of multi-isotope dilution whenever possible to improve the precision of the measurement and the use of triple quadrupole ICP-MS to manage the interferences.

The presentation will present the development of the method, its contribution to the improvment of the discrimination, its validation and its application. Yet, the method has been applied to the analysis of about 200 samples. An improvment of the precision up to a factor 5 could be reached in comparison to a more classical approach. This has allowed to achieve a good discrimination of the wines at different levels, from national to almost farm level.