The Impact of the Fermentation Strategy on the Flavour Formation of Ilzer Rose (Malus domestica Borkh.) Apple Wine.

Valerie Ruppert,Jörg Voit,Peter Hiden,Barbara Siegmund,Georg Innerhofer

doi:10.3390/foods10102348

Abstract

The flavour and the volatilome of apple wines made from the Austrian heritage variety Ilzer Rose was in the scope of this study. The apple wines were produced by adopting oenological practises that are not commonly used in fruit wine production. Different fermentation strategies including the addition of enzymes with β-glucosidase activity, addition of a fining agent, maceration of the mash along with mash fermentation were applied. The volatile compounds of the juices as intermediates and the resulting apple wines were analysed using headspace-SPME GC-MS. CATA technique with a well-trained panel was applied for sensory evaluation. The results show that the flavour of single-variety apple wine can be significantly altered by taking oenological measures. High correlations were found between the results of the analytical investigation and the sensory evaluation. Maceration of the mash leads to an increase in the fruity character of the products, also reflected by significantly higher fruit ester quantities in the wine. During mash fermentation, spontaneous malolactic fermentation was induced leading to a product with new, but thoroughly interesting sensory properties of the apple wine. The results of this study demonstrate that the integration of oenological measures may open a wide field to the development of a high diversity in apple wine flavour.

Highlights

Apple wine and cider are traditional alcoholic beverages with an alcohol content lower than 8.25%
Several recent papers deal with flavour properties and volatile compounds of commercially available products [2,3,4,5], of ciders produced from different apple varieties [6,7], or different stages of maturity [6,8], or cider and apple wines produced with varying production strategies [7,9,10,11,12,13]
We investigated the volatile compounds and sensory properties of apple wine produced from the Austrian heritage apple variety Ilzer Rose after applying different fermentation strategies

Summary

Introduction

Apple wine and cider are traditional alcoholic beverages with an alcohol content lower than 8.25%. The European Cider and Fruit Wine Association (AICV) states that within the European Union, cider and fruits wines have some of the fastest growth rates of all alcoholic beverages [1]. This increase in popularity is reflected by the number of scientific papers that were published on this topic in the past decade. In contrast to wine technology, in which the impact of grape variety, oenological yeast strains, fermentation strategy or other parameters have been well investigated, there is still a lack of knowledge with respect to the behaviour and the properties of apple wines and ciders. With the recent introduction of oenological techniques in apple process lines (e.g., temperature control during the fermentation, addition of nutrients or sulphites), the character of fruit wines has changed completely, and they have emerged as highly attractive products possessing wine-like character and often showing the typical varietal flavour properties of the processed fruits

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