Grape seeds are a rich source of flavan-3-ol monomers, oligomers, and polymers. The diverse profile of compounds includes mainly B-type procyanidins (especially C4→C8 linked molecules) and the key monomers, catechin, and epicatechin that are positively implicated in the ‘French Paradox’. Today grape seed nutraceuticals have become a multi-million-dollar industry. This has created incentives to elucidate the variations in chemistry across cultivars, to identify signs of adulteration, and to understand the intrinsic and extrinsic factors controlling the expression of metabolites in the seeds’ metabolome. This review provides a critical overview of the existing literature on grape seed chemistry. Although the biosynthetic pathways for polymeric procyanidins in seeds have not yet been explained, abiotic factors have been shown to modulate associated genes. Research of extrinsic factors has demonstrated that the control of procyanidin expression is strongly influenced, in order of importance, by genotype (species first, then variety) and environment, as claimed anecdotally. Unfortunately, research outcomes on the effects of abiotic factors have low certainty, because effects can be specific to genotype or variety, and there is limited control over physical metrics in the field. Thus, to gain a fuller understanding of the effects of abiotic factors and biosynthetic pathways, and realise potential for optimisation, a more fundamental research approach is needed. Nevertheless, the current synthesis offers insight into the selection of species or varieties according to the profile of polyphenols, as well as for optimisation of horticultural practices, with a view to produce products that contain the compounds that support health claims.

The resinous wood produced by the Aquilaria and Gyrinops species—agarwood—is both rare and highly valuable. It is used in products from perfumes to medicines and has an estimated global market value of $32 billion. As a result, the adulteration and illegal purchasing of agarwood is widespread and of specific concern to enforcement agencies globally. Therefore, it is of interest to have a fast, reliable, and user-friendly method to confirm the authenticity of a sample of agarwood. We investigated the use of near infrared (NIR) data to develop a method that rapidly distinguished between authentic and non-authentic agarwood samples, based upon a soft independent model of class analogy (SIMCA), using software specific to the application of infrared data to material authentication. The model showed a clear distinction between the authentic and non-authentic samples. However, the small values involved led to poor automatic validation results.