Pigment composition of wines obtained from carbonic maceration: correlations with colour features

Carbonic maceration wines (CMWs)are obtained by means of a peculiar vinification technique in which whole berries are subjected to anaerobic atmosphere with the aim to permit a number of biochemical transformation carried out by endogenous enzymes. Phenolics and pigments are affected by the anaerobic metabolism of barries and several studies reported significant differences among conventional and carbonic macerated wines for what concern their phenolic contentand colour features. The aim of this work was to quantify the pigment content of 30 Italian CMW, and to correlate trhat data with chromatic spectrophotometric measurements, in order to establish the relative contribution of each class of compound to the perceived color of wine obtained from carbonic maceration.