Mercury Analysis of Wine and Foods

Having survived dry January, it is that time of the week, we have almost made it through to the first weekend of February and thinking about that glass (or bottle) of wine we have sat waiting at home.

The team at Analytix love to experiment and recently took some wine down to the laboratory to explore mercury levels present (some would say a waste but all in the name of science) using the Milestone DMA direct mercury analyser.

The system does not require daily calibration and has the advantage of ‘running on air’ that removes the requirement for in-house or bottled gases so the wine was simply weighed into sample boats in triplicate and loaded them onto the DMA autosampler. With each sample analysis in less than seven minutes (including weighing time), after 20 minutes had a reproducible result with an average mercury level of 5.52µg/kg and a RSD of 3%.

Although this was an example of running liquids (aka wine), the system is equally as fast at running solid samples such as foods as no sample preparation is required. A quick and easy Friday afternoon experiment and an extra thought for that bottle sat at home and the unknowns that we are consuming.

More information online