Key odorants of french syrah wines from the northern rhone valley

Abstract

Little research has been undertaken to investigate the main contributors to the aroma of Syrah wines from the cool northern part of the Rhone valley despite the historical importance of this cultivar for this wine region. The aim of the present work was to study the key odorants of Crozes-Hermitage wines made from two vintages with distinct climatic conditions (cool in 2013, warm in 2015) using supercritical CO2 dearomatized (sCO2) wine as a matrix for reconstitution studies, and the Pivot profile sensory method for omission tests. The volatile composition of the two wines was first assessed through determination of 76 molecules. Then, the impact of four matrices (synthetic wines with 10% and 12.5% of ethanol, and dearomatized native wines through rotary evaporation or using sCO2) on the quality of the reconstitution was investigated. For both vintages, 35 molecules with OAV > 0.5 were identified in both wines, with rotundone and 3-sulfanylhexanol (3SH) enabling the strongest discrimination between the two vintages. Wine dearomatized using sCO2 was identified as the best matrix. The best models built using this matrix were composed of aroma compounds with OAV > 5 and OAV > 10 highlighting that this dearomatization approach can be valuable to reconstitute the aroma of wine using a small number of molecules. For the 2013 wine, the omission of rotundone and 2-furfurylthiol had the greatest impact on the olfactive profile for non-anosmic and anosmic panelists to rotundone, respectively. 3SH, whose omission decreased the rating of the “fruity” attribute, was identified as the main contributor to the aroma of Syrah wine produced in 2015.