How does this word taste?

If there is a word that sounds like chüchümel, which taste do you think it might signify? (Listen to the MP3 here.)

I came across this word on the package of a snack. And the definition of this word is exactly how I felt when I read the word, even before tasting the snack.

I asked several friends about their instinctive feeling of this word. At lot of them gave me exactly the correct answer. (They didn’t cheat. You can’t even find the answer by simply googling before this post was published.)

I asked 21 people, and 10 of them answered “sour”, two of them gave examples like lemon and cherry to illustrate the taste. When some thing goes bad, it should taste sour, or foul. I am not sure what exactly they meant by this answer. One of my friend who went for “spicy” explained you may very likely make noise like chü chü chü after eaten something really spicy.

چۈچۈمەل (chüchümel) means sour in the Uyghur language.

This might indicate sound by itself, indeed, might mean something. A similar phenomenon is the bouba/kiki effect. This falls into the scope of “phonosemantics“. Chüchümel may well serve as an example.