title: Sweet-like off-flavor in Aglianico del Vulture wine: ethyl phenylacetate as the mainly involved compound.
abstract: Interest in high-quality and peculiar products is a recent trend in the enological field; for this reason, production of wines from autochthonous vine varieties is requested by consumers. Aglianico wine from the Italian region "Basilicata" is an example of a promising product strictly connected to the territory; nevertheless, it is affected by a frequent sweet-like off-flavor. In this study the compositional cause of this off-flavor was investigated by SPME-GC-olfactometry, SPME-GC-MS, and sensory tests. Ethyl phenylacetate (EPhA) was found to be the compound mainly responsible, and its sensory threshold was determined near 73 microg/L; products with the odorant concentration near and up to these values were always recognized as significantly different from the other wines and were often far from wine technical pleasantness; besides EPhA gave to the wines a strong honey-like character. Some preliminary hypotheses about its mechanism of formation (shikimate pathway) are presented in this study: these hypotheses could explain the correlation between EPhA and volatile phenols that was found by both sensory tests and GC quantitative analysis of wines affected by different levels of defect.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienze degli Alimenti, Università degli Studi di Udine, Via Marangoni 97, 33100 Udine, Italia.
authors.forename: Lara
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Tat
authors.forename: Piergiorgio
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Comuzzo
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Battistutta
authors.forename: Roberto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Zironi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002849:Chromatography, Gas; D008401:Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry; D006801:Humans; D009812:Odorants / Q000032:analysis; D010648:Phenylacetates / Q000032:analysis*; D012903:Smell; D013649:Taste; D014920:Wine / Q000032:analysis*
chemical_list: D010648:Phenylacetates; C521816:ethyl phenylacetate