Composition of industrial bergamot petitgrain produced in Calabria

The production of petitgrain from bergamot by the transformation industry is not a common practice. This is performed rarely due to the high cost and low demand. However, this product is among the most appreciated ones in the fragrances industry. It is thus difficult to find articles on the chemical characterization of this product particularly on samples produced by the industry and of secure authenticity. This article represents the only source of recent information on the composition of bergamot petitgrain industrially extracted since the previous studies were published several decades ago. The study is performed on two samples of secure origin, obtained by industrial distillation of selected vegetable material. The samples were analyzed by gas chromatography–flame ionization detector (GC–FID) and GC–mass spectrometry (GC–MS), and identification was performed based on similarity index and linear retention indices. The results are discussed in comparison with the few references available. In this article is also reported the enantiomeric distribution of selected volatiles determined in this type of oils for the first time by direct enantioselective GC and by multidimensional GC.