Bubble Gum Flavor ? Ethyl sorbate

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Rice_Guy

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I am curious if anyone has had bubble gum flavor in their wine? if so what conditions produced it?
background; in January in preparation for spring contest I am leading a wine defect class trying to show all the flavors mentioned in November ‘22 Winemaker Magazine. Reductive and VA and acetaldehyde are easy to find/ make, ,,, but how can I make bubble gum flavor? ,,, by January
* temperature?
* lower or raise pH?
* high SO2
* ?? Other
 
What if you were to add a four or five times dosage of potassium sorbate to a wine? Might even take more than that.
My gut says an overdose of sorbate.
Based on an article about mini reactors making ethyl sorbate, the first test was 1gm of K sorbate with 9gm of saki and a sprinkle of sulfonic acid in a canning jar,, > heat above 100 C in a pressure cooker and then naturally cool, ,,, thirty minutes or so.
Sample dehydrated in the process. > failure
There is an articles in J Viticulture and Enology about doing it in six months with sparkling wine. Wonder if carbonation would help?
 
I have wondered if yeast metabolism is part of the process because folks add sorbate to wines where they fear that live yeast will ferment added sugar. ,,, and logically wouldn’t be adding sorbate if they thought the yeast were dead. ,,, The last club example that I tasted also had clumping yeast floating in the bottle which prompted me to ask if she 1) used
K sorbate and 2) like to bottle very young. I so far haven’t produced bubble gum myself and would trust the diagnosis a lot more if I could produce it at will. It is bad to rely on second guessing symptoms/ process in a bottle and having the guesses be true.

Maybe use Belgian Saison yeast (3724) at least at the beginning of the ferment?... some have bubble gum notes.
I am thinking of stealing half a gallon out of a 50F garage cyser and testing the theory.
The bubble gum isn’t a bad flavor, and if put on something like a tart cherry turns it into a drinkable fruit punch. ,,,, > So I Need to thaw some juice to fill up what I steal.
 
As so often happens here a topic catches my interest and I have to read more. Among other things, I learned about carbonic maceration (rather interesting!) and that K-sorbate shouldn't be used in wines that have undergone MLF because it may produce geraniol, a geranium smell.

Supposedly the average threshold level for detecting K-sorbate is 0.182 g/l. You never mentioned - Did you try adding too much sorbate?

I, too, have never experienced the bubblegum smell in my very short wine making endeavor - but now I want to.
 
Test number two one gram of sorbate with fifty ml of wine is at 24 hours in a 28C box.

The current apple batches all have tannic crab apple in them which would complicate the flavor, so ,,, I started a fresh ferment > will add excess sorbate at 1.005 or 1.010 to look for active/ live yeast flavor issues.
 
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