No 140 Sicilian Grapefruit

The smell of the red-fleshed grapefruit that we made into our grapefruit spirit, just picked from the tree a week ago, was amazing. We have never had such highly aromatic fruits in our hands. And so it didn't surprise us that we were able to produce a product with an unusually intense smell and taste. Quantitatively, the main ingredient in grapefruit oil is limonene, but (+)-nootkatone is responsible for the typical smell of grapefruit, a bicyclic sesquiterpene whose odor threshold is 0.001 ppm, i.e. we can smell one nootkatone molecule out of a billion air molecules. But the juice also contributes significantly to the aroma, especially with thiols, aldehydes, ketones and esters, but not with the bitter substances, which fortunately remain in the stillage during distillation. The grapefruit was created as a cross between an orange and a grapefruit. Contrary to what our dear North German friends sometimes do, it must not be equated with the latter, because they are two different fruits!