Characterization of the key aromatic constituents in tea flowers of elite Chinese tea cultivars

The volatiles in flowers of twenty-three elite tea cultivars were obtained by simultaneous distillation extraction, from which seventy-nine aromatic constituents were identified using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. The major detected constituents found were acetophenone, linalool, 1-hexanol, 2-pentanol, methyl salicylate, 4-methyl-2-hexanone, alpha-methyl-benzene methanol, cis-linaloloxide, acetic acid, Z-3-Hexen-1-ol, S-2-heptanol, and hexanal. Both acetophenone and linalool were determined from every cultivar, and each volatile accounted for more than 20 % of the total. Several of the cultivars analysed contained some special constituents which were not detected from other cultivars.