VIRGIN OLIVE OIL AROMA - RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VOLATILE COMPOUNDS AND SENSORY ATTRIBUTES BY CHEMOMETRICS

Volatile compounds are responsible for virgin olive oil aroma, and this paper demonstrates that basic sensory perceptions (green, fruity, sweet, ripe, over-ripe, undesirable, pungent) can be totally explained by volatile compounds with R(2)-adjusted >0.85. Thirty-two samples of 6 European varieties of virgin olive oil were characterized by 55 chemical compounds and 55 sensory attributes evaluated by 6 different panels of the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Greece, and Italy. Multidimensional scaling was used to bring out inter-intra dissimilarities from datasets of sensory attributes and volatile compounds.