Pepper

Warm, dry and woody-spicy, with a fresh, terpenic-citrus lift and a tingling, peppery bite.

Pepper is the fruit of a perennial, woody climbing plant from the pepper family. It grows wild in the forests of the Western Ghats in south-western India; the Malabar Coast below, in today's Kerala, has been the classic pepper land since antiquity. Using clinging roots, the vine climbs trees or support poles to more than 10 m and bears hanging spikes of small drupes only about 5 mm across. Black, green, white and red pepper all come from this one plant. Pink pepper, by contrast, is not a pepper botanically: it comes from the pepper tree (Schinus) of the cashew family and has its own page. Today pepper is grown throughout the tropics, by far most of all in Vietnam, ahead of countries such as Brazil, India and Indonesia.

One plant, four colours: for black pepper the fruits are picked unripe and dried until the skin turns dark. Green pepper also comes from unripe fruits, kept green by brining, freeze-drying or gentle drying. For white pepper, ripe fruits are soaked until the flesh comes away, leaving the pale seed. Red pepper consists of fully ripe fruits, dried or preserved. For perfumery, dried, mostly black peppercorns are coarsely crushed and steam-distilled, yielding just a few per cent of essential oil. There is also a CO₂ extract: supercritical carbon dioxide draws the aroma compounds out of the pepper at low temperatures of about 30 to 50 °C.

Pepper usually adds a dry, tingling accent to the top of a fragrance and gives fresh citrus notes such as bergamot some spice. Its warm, woody side blends well with cedarwood, vetiver and patchouli. In our range it appears in 58 fragrances, in 34 of them in the top.

Spicy · Woody · top note

In the tropics, pepper is harvested as soon as the first fruits on a spike turn yellow to red. Once dried, the peppercorns keep for a long time – so pepper oil and CO₂ extract are available all year round.

In our fragrances, it often appears alongside Cedarwood, bergamot, vetiver, patchouli, musk, sandalwood, vanilla.

Pepper is one of the oldest traded spices in the world. In the 1st century, Roman ships sailed via the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to southern India; most of Rome's pepper was loaded at the port of Muziris on the Malabar Coast. In Rome the spice was kept in dedicated warehouses, the horrea piperataria. Around 77 AD, Pliny the Elder complained that India drained the empire of at least 50 million sesterces every year, and wondered why a spice whose only appeal was its pungency should be so sought after. The word pepper came via Latin piper and Greek péperi from the Sanskrit pippalī. More on its role as a currency can be found on the Black Pepper page.

• In studies, roughly one in five to one in four test subjects could not smell the pepper odorant rotundone, even at high concentrations.
• Rotundone was discovered as early as 1967 in the tubers of nutgrass (Cyperus rotundus), after which it is named – that it is the key molecule of pepper's smell was only recognised in 2008.
• In ancient Rome, according to Pliny, long pepper – a close relative – cost almost four times as much as black pepper: 15 instead of 4 denarii per pound.

Pepper's typical peppery smell comes mainly from rotundone, a sesquiterpene ketone (C₁₅H₂₂O, PubChem CID 5321003, molar mass about 218 g/mol). In 2008 Australian researchers identified it as the most important aroma compound of pepper and also as the source of the peppery note in Syrah and Shiraz wines; marjoram and rosemary contain it too. Those who can smell rotundone detect it at about 8 billionths of a gram per litre of water, and about 16 in red wine. The fresh, citrusy lift of pepper oil comes from volatile monoterpenes such as limonene (C₁₀H₁₆, CID 22311) and sabinene (C₁₀H₁₆, CID 18818), along with pinenes and sesquiterpenes.