Determination of bisphenol A in wine by sol-gel immunoaffinity chromatography, HPLC and fluorescence detection

Abstract

The paper presents a highly selective analytical method for the determination of traces of bisphenol A (BPA) in wine and the results of a survey 59 wine samples sourced from vats (steel, wood and plastic), glass bottles and Tetra briks. The procedure consists of sample clean-up by sol-gel immunoaffinity chromatography followed by determination of BPA by high-performance liquid chromatography and fluorescence detection. The method has a limit of detection (LOD) (S/N = 3) of 0.1 ng ml⁻¹ and a limit of quantitation (LOQ) (S/N = 6) of 0.2 ng ml⁻¹. In 13 of 59 wine samples, the BPA concentration was below the LOQ. The mean and median for all wine samples with BPA concentrations above the LOQ were 0.58 and 0.40 ng ml⁻¹, respectively. These values — the first set of data on BPA in wine — are far lower than previously published BPA levels derived from migration experiments using wine simulants. Experiments carried out by submerging plastic stoppers in ethanol–water (11 : 89, v/v) up to 11 weeks indicated that detectable amounts of BPA can be leached from some stoppers.

Keywords:

• Bisphenol A
• wine
• migration
• immunoaffinity chromatography
• sol-gel
• high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)

Acknowledgement

The authors thank Heidi Schwartz for carrying out the confirmation studies with the HPLC system equipped with the electrochemical detector. They are also grateful to Georg Weingart for supplying wine samples from local vintagers together with data on their storage conditions. The present study would have been impossible without the support of Japan EnviroChemicals, Tokyo, Japan, who provided BPA antibodies.