Today I read on Becca Yeamans-Irwin’s excellent website The Academic Wino a summary and review of a fascinating study published last year in Food Chemistry by C Muñoz-González, C Cueva, M Ángeles Pozo-Bayón and M Victoria Moreno-Arribas: ‘Ability of human oral microbiota to produce wine odorant aglycones from odourless grape glycosidic aroma precursors’.
As Yeamans-Irwin points out, this is a very small-scale study. However, the results suggest that the microbial population in your mouth – which is probably unique to you – could affect the aromas you detect in a wine because these microbes are able to transform odourless aroma precursors in a wine into volatile aromatic molecules.
This potentially means that we would all have a slightly different experience when tasting a wine. Then we might be taking into consideration not just bottle variation but also oral-microbe variation.
The image shows Actinomyces naeslundii, a bacterium that, according to the study, produces compounds that are associated with floral aromas.
