  Food and beverage authentication is the process by which foods or beverages
are verified as complying with its label description, for example, verifying if
the denomination of origin of an olive oil bottle is correct or if the variety
of a certain bottle of wine matches its label description. The common way to
deal with an authentication process is to measure a number of attributes on
samples of food and then use these as input for a classification problem. Our
motivation stems from data consisting of measurements of nine chemical
compounds denominated Anthocyanins, obtained from samples of Chilean red wines
of grape varieties Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Carm\'{e}n\`{e}re. We
consider a model-based approach to authentication through a semiparametric
multivariate hierarchical linear mixed model for the mean responses, and
covariance matrices that are specific to the classification categories.
Specifically, we propose a model of the ANOVA-DDP type, which takes advantage
of the fact that the available covariates are discrete in nature. The results
suggest that the model performs well compared to other parametric alternatives.
This is also corroborated by application to simulated data.
