Cape Gooseberry

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Cape gooseberry is the orange berry of Physalis peruviana, ripened inside a papery husk. It smells of peach and apricot over a creamy lactonic sweetness, with a rose-floral lift and a tang behind it. It is not related to gooseberry.

Scent Profile

Fruity leads and the primary source is unusually direct about why: gamma-octalactone has the highest odour activity value of every volatile measured, and it reads as peach and apricot. Lactonic is the facet that makes this note itself. Gamma-hexalactone is the largest single aroma component by concentration at 17.66 per cent and is described as sweet, creamy, lactonic and coconut-like. Sweet_vanillic covers mesifuran, called 'strong, sweet and pleasant', and the plain sweetness both sources open with. Honeyed comes from the glossary, which takes the ripe berry toward honey. Floral is not a guess: benzyl alcohol is the second most abundant compound at 17.22 per cent and the paper describes it and 2-phenylethanol as floral and rose. Tropical is the pineapple-and-citrus reading that the Symrise copy and the common description of physalis both carry, and it has the widest spread here because the GC-MS paper does not name a tropical compound. Sour is the 'sweet and tangy' of the glossary, and it is deliberately higher than the published `ground-cherry` note's 0.20 because that note's own source records cape gooseberry as the more acidic of the two. Below the naming bar: green and aldehydic are the waxy green nonanal and hexanal the paper calls trace, citrus is the glossary's 'hint of citrus', tobacco_hay is the coumarin and tobacco side of gamma-hexalactone, and aromatic_herbal and earthy are the musty herbal 1-heptanol.

ScentWheel

Breadthmedium

EnvelopeHeart · ~4h lasting

Family Fruity, Sweet & Gourmand

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Physalis peruviana, Solanaceae, native to the Andes and grown widely in South Africa, which is where the Cape in the name comes from. No supplier sells a cape-gooseberry fragrance material. The vector is built from a peer-reviewed odour-activity-value study of the fruit's volatiles, corroborated by a perfumery glossary entry under the trade name goldenberry.

Usage in Perfumery

A soft fruity note used alongside peach, raspberry, jasmine and rose. Parfumo records 10 placements across 9 brands. Fragrantica does not carry the term. Symrise sells a captive built on this fruit as Golden Globe NaturePrint.