Revisiting wine authentication in a changing landscape: Trends, challenges, and future directions

The study of wine quality, traceability, and authenticity continues to be a highly active area of research. Since 2020, dozens of papers have been published in indexed journals, and the pace shows no signs of slowing down. Despite this prolific output, some critical issues remain unresolved, and new challenges continue to emerge. Although the most commonly used approaches, compound families, analytical techniques, and chemometric methods have remained largely unchanged, recent contributions have introduced improvements in method simplicity, speed, analyte coverage, and data analysis tools. Beyond the traditional focal points (e.g., geographical origin, grape varieties, and aging), the growing consumer interest in attributes such as organic, vegan, or high-reputation wines is shifting the research landscape. In this overview, we examine the literature from the past five years on wine characterization and authentication, outlining the current state of the art and highlighting, in our view, the most innovative and pressing topics.