Sawdust aroma

Other volatile compounds present in oak wood can transmit unpleasant aromas to the wine, such as the sawdust aroma of dry wood that is perceptible in some wines aged in new barrels. The substances that cause these aromas have been identified in both American and European oak wood, for instance, ( )-2-nonenal, 3-octen-l-one, ( )-2-octenal, and 1-decanal. Their connection with the sawdust aroma has been established by olfactometry, and they have been identified in wines suffering from this flaw, though toasting the wood (Chatonnet and Dubourdieu 1998). 

Figure 1. Identification of volatile compounds responsible for the sawdust aroma of oak wood by coupling gas chromatography and olfactive detection...

Chatonnet, P. and Dubourdieu, D. (1998). Identification of substances responsible for the sawdust aroma in oak wood,/. Sci. Food Agric., 76,179-188. 

Furfural was first isolated in the eady nineteenth century. Dobereiner is credited with the discovery. He obtained a small amount of a yellow "oil" (too Htde to characterize) as a by-product in the preparation of formic acid (8). Other chemists found that the same "oil" having a charactedstic aroma could be obtained by boiling finely divided vegetable materials such as oats, com, sawdust, bran, etc, with aqueous sulfuric acid or other acids (9,10). The oil was present in the Hquid resulting from condensation of the vapors produced during heating. The empirical formula was determined by Stenhouse... 

In contrast, odour intensity of other components related to off flavours ( herbal , sawdust , greasy , and cucumber ) can be seen to decrease with toasting. The same happened with the intensity of fruity and floral aromas of linalool oxide, p-damascenone, or 2-phenylethanol, and the oak lactones odour descriptors. 

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