Variations in our salivary proteins may explain why different people can like different wines. Researchers have linked the concentrations of two types of proteins to how intense wine drinkers find a wine’s notes, such as fruity or floral, and their preferences for the alcoholic drink.
A person’s wine preferences may at least partially come down to their cultural background, knowledge of the drink and individual taste. But at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues wanted to better understand the components of saliva that may influence how different people perceive the flavour of the same wine.
The researchers recruited 26 people who either worked in the wine industry or had a wine-tasting qualification. Half of the participants described themselves as Western and the other half as Chinese. Howell says the team wanted people from different cultural backgrounds to better understand the extent that this can influence their wine preferences.
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All of the participants tasted samples of eight Shiraz wines from different regions of the world.
Those in the Chinese group reported tasting “fruity”, “floral” or “sweet” notes more acutely than the Western participants. Out of the eight samples, the Chinese group’s universal favourite was a wine from the Gippsland region of Australia, which had the highest alcohol, sugar and tannin contents of all the wines. The Western group didn’t have a clear favourite.
Next, each of the participants provided a saliva sample. The researchers pooled all of the Western group and all of the Chinese group’s samples into two separate saliva collections.
They identified 121 salivary proteins in both of the sample collections, but the Chinese group’s had higher amounts of the protein lipocalin-1, while the Western group’s had more proteins rich in the amino acid proline. These different protein concentrations may explain the variations in the groups’ perception of the wines’ flavours and their preferences, say the researchers.
In another part of the experiment, 5 millimetres of a 2019 Gippsland wine were added to the groups’ saliva collections. The researchers then analysed the volatile chemicals that were released, finding that the Chinese group’s saliva samples released more esters – hydrocarbons that give wine a fruity taste – than the Western group’s.
Future studies could further assess how our salivary proteins influence our preferences for different foods and drinks, says Howell. This could one day lead to more targeted marketing of produce and reduced waste, she says.
at the University of California, Davis, points out that the study was small. Further research should be carried out, preferably with participants whose palates are trained to identify aromas and flavours in the specific wines being tested, she says.
bioRxiv
