GARGLING, sucking and spitting are the unsavoury actions that serious wine lovers say a proper tasting demands. But the full complexity of taste may come from something even more distasteful: mouth bugs. These bacteria help give us the rich flavours of wine, onions and peppers.
It has long been known that smell plays a big part in the perception of flavour, and Christian Starkenmann and his team at Firmenich, a flavour company in Geneva, Switzerland, had previously found that saliva can turn odourless sulphur-containing compounds from fruit and vegetables into aromatic chemicals called thiols. Now they have shown that bacteria…
