JAW DROP: Wine and Your Mouth

Wine Blast with Susie and Peter

In this episode, wine enthusiasts Dr. Ron Georgiou MW, a dentist and Master of Wine, joins the hosts to discuss how oral health directly imp

Key takeaways

• Dr. Ron Georgiou MW explains that saliva is essential for dissolving food particles and releasing aromatic esters for taste perception.
• The acidity in wine can lower mouth pH to levels that weaken tooth enamel, especially if the protective 'acquired pellicle' is disrupted.

Main topics

• Oral health and wine tasting
• The role of saliva in flavor perception

Notable quotes

Saliva opens the door to flavour.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a vital guide for wine lovers to maintain their

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Thanks for tuning in to Wine Blast. Sign up to Wine Blast Plus to get exclusive subscriber-only episodes, early access to all programmes, plus our tasty recipes and wine tips. Subscribers can also enjoy our full archive, as well as benefit from discounts with the likes of Jancis Robinson Glassware, Academie Du Vin Library and Coravin. You can even give a subscription as a gift. Just visit wineblast.co.uk or click the link in the show notes. Speaker 3 (0:34) Hello, this is Wine Blast, but I'm sorry, I want you to imagine you are in the dentist's chair. Now normally it would smell faintly of antiseptic and anxiety, with very little light relief available, but this is not your average dentist. Speaker 2 (0:51) No, this surgery is different. It's like you've gone down the rabbit hole and emerged in the middle of a... glorious sunset on the Greek wine island of Santorini. The walls are painted with that most evocative of landscapes, white houses, blue roofs, azure sea. golden sunset. Around the room there are replica vases, a Greek bust on a plinth, a profusion of pink bougainvillea flowers, even a sandpit in lieu of a beach. There may not be bottomless Assyrtiko, but this is my kind of dentist. Speaker 3 (1:26) And the dentist in question is Dr Ron Giorgio, MW. Note the titles. Dr Ron is a rare beast in being both a full-time dental surgeon and... a master of wine. He's also a firm believer in what he calls a holistic approach to a dental surgery. Apparently before Santorini it was ancient Egypt and before that it was a tropical rainforest complete with toy orangutans that the kids could cuddle while being treated. When we asked about all this he said, like you I like to shake things up a bit and be creative and passionate. and do things differently. Speaker 2 (2:06) Dr. Rod is based in Sydney, Australia, and is known as the wine industry's very own Superman. Dentist by day, master of wine by night. So we just had to get him on the show. Here's a bite-sized taster of what's coming up. Speaker 1 (2:21) You probably don't want to brush your teeth in the morning for various reasons. Speaker 2 (2:25) So there we have it, a dentist on record, on record, telling us not to brush our teeth. Speaker 3 (2:30) I think you'll find Ron told us very firmly not to selectively edit that comment out. We will be in serious trouble. And everyone tuning in now has to commit to listening to the interview in full to find out the true context of that remark. Yeah, Speaker 2 (2:44) yeah, fair enough, fair enough. That was very cheeky. Sorry, Ron, just couldn't help it. How about this little morsel instead? Speaker 1 (2:52) Yeah, if you're going to have dirty, horrible looking teeth, but your teeth won't dissolve away, at least for a moment in time. We've all been there. Speaker 3 (3:00) Although... quite what that really means. Again, you'll have to wait and see. What we can promise you is a fascinating episode that every wine lover needs to hear. And we'll also be chipping in on a personal level as to what we do and how that will be changing in the aftermath of making this programme. Speaker 2 (3:17) Yeah, we said it before and we'll say it again. This podcast will change your life. It's certainly changed ours. In ways you Speaker 3 (3:22) can never imagine. Before Speaker 2 (3:24) we bring Ron in, shall we just briefly set the scene? Speaker 3 (3:28) Okay, good idea. When we drink wine, we tend to focus on what we might term the top level processes. In short, what the wine tastes like. On one level, that's what we perceive from the taste buds in our mouth. Salt, sweet, sour, bitter, umami. On another level, it's the more subtle flavour perceptions from aromas generated on our palates, which are then... processed by the olfactory bulb. Speaker 2 (3:52) What we don't often pause to consider is what we might crudely call our tasting gear. Our mouths, teeth, tongue, gums, soft tissue, throat, saliva, even our oral microbiome. The truth is though that wine impacts all these bits of our tasting apparatus and conversely all these bits can influence the way we taste the wine. So the immediate questions that arise are What effect is wine really having on these things? And how can we best ensure we taste as well as we can and do as little damage as possible? The Speaker 3 (4:28) answers are intriguing. But before we hear from Dr. Ron, it's worth recapping on some basics as we understand them. Eating or drinking things that are acidic or sugary means the pH in your mouth drops. In other words, it becomes a more acidic environment. This weakens your tooth enamel and... disrupts your oral microbiome. Wine is pretty acidic and can be sugary too. But it's not as simple as saying wine is nothing but bad for your mouth. There's much more at play and many things we can do to pre-empt or minimise the adverse outcomes. Speaker 2 (5:05) Yeah, it's also true that your oral status can determine your tasting ability and acuity. There are ways to make sure our tasting gear is in the best possible condition, enabling us to get the most out of our... carefully chosen wines. Things like oral probiotics, sugar-free gum, whitening, tooth mousse, they're all becoming more mainstream these days. Are these good things for us wine lovers to dive into or should we be wary? And while we're at it, what the hell is our acquired pellicle. And why is that important? Speaker 3 (5:37) Now, where things have got particularly interesting recently is the ongoing research into the oral microbiome and the gut-brain-gut-mouth axis. And of course, we did that fascinating episode, didn't we, with Dr. Tim Spector on wine and the gut microbiome back in season four. Now, here's a fun fact for you. Did you know your mouth has a greater diversity of microbial populations than your gut or your skin? It harbours all kinds of viruses, archaea, protozoa, fungi and more than 700 species of bacteria. And it seems increasingly clear that your oral microbiome can have a significant impact on your general... health, with research linking a healthy oral microbiome to better outcomes regarding everything from Alzheimer's to cancer, diabetes, depression, arthritis, cardiovascular disease. Speaker 2 (6:32) Yeah, on the flip side, of course, a poor oral microbiome and gum disease are linked to negative outcomes across many or all of these diseases. And gum disease is significantly more common than we might think. Recent figures estimate around half of UK adults have gum disease. And 60 % of England's adult population have not seen an NHS dentist in the two years to March 2026. That's Speaker 3 (6:59) frightening, Speaker 2 (7:00) isn't Speaker 3 (7:00) it? Speaker 2 (7:00) Given that wine can be bad for your mouth, we wine lovers need to sit up and pay attention. Speaker 3 (7:06) Okay, so on that bombshell, it's time to bring in Dr Ron Giorgio, MW. We're going to split this interview into two. dealing with taste perception and how we can best enhance that first, before then moving on to more explicitly health-focused topics. And on both fronts, we're not just asking about the background, we're also asking for tips about how to live our best wine lives. First up, I asked Dr Ron how our mouths influence what we taste. Speaker 1 (7:38) That's a very complex question. How long do we have? Speaker 3 (7:42) Well, start with a broad brushstroke and we'll hone in on bits. Speaker 1 (7:48) Well, clearly the tongue is sort of the central player in this. And a little bit of a fun fact is that we have over 4,600 taste buds on our tongues. The traditional map that we all may have learnt in terms of where we taste sour and bitter and salty and umami and sweet, etc., has been debunked quite a few years ago. And every area of the mouth has the ability to taste every nuance in food and wine. Speaker 1 (8:23) Interestingly enough, as we get older, we lose the number of taste buds that we hold. So by the time someone turns 60, we lose 50 % of our taste buds. It's a complex thing because taste perception varies on many things besides the obvious, the type of things that we're eating. It varies depending on saliva. So some people have lots of saliva, some people don't. As we get older, we tend to have drier mouths. That influences taste greatly into the negative. A drier mouth generally tastes things in a more bitter sort of or sour profile. Speaker 3 (9:03) Why is that? What's the saliva doing? Speaker 1 (9:05) So the saliva is, besides being a lubricant and antibacterial, saliva is what dissolves the food and releases. the particles and stimulates the receptors in our tongue. And also we have taste buds and taste receptors at the back of our throat. So as you know, 80 or 90 % of taste is smell. And, you know, when we teach wine, we get people to hold their noses and taste the wine and then take their hand off their nose and taste the wine. And the perception is completely different. So if you have a dry mouth, you simply can't put a lot of those aromatic esters into a gaseous form for our receptors to pick them up appropriately. So that's the big part of it. Speaker 3 (9:53) So just to understand that, so saliva kind of opens the door to flavor, does it? Correct. Speaker 1 (10:00) Saliva is hugely, hugely important. And you'd like to think that the... The runny stuff that we have in our mouths is the same for everyone, but it's completely different from person to person. Some people have very, very watery saliva. Some people have very, very thick saliva. The consistency of saliva and the flow rate of saliva is not only affected by how much water we drink, for example. By the way, just so you know, we produce over a litre and a half of saliva a day. That's a lot of saliva. And we need at least 600 mils of water to help the body produce enough saliva, let alone... the rest of our sort of needs. So the volume and the type or the consistency of saliva is hugely, hugely important, but also in terms of how it influences pH, you know, the neutral acidic base scale. So the pH of the mouth is somewhere between 6.8 and 7. And depending on what's happening with saliva, because saliva can buffer acids, for example, if you have less saliva. then the pH is skewed in the mouth and therefore taste perception is skewed as a result of pH because different things release differently depending on the environment of the mouth, including pH. Speaker 3 (11:15) And so, you know, if you're taking in wine, it's obviously acidic. The more saliva you have, the better it is at buffering that acidity? Speaker 1 (11:26) Correct. And that will also depend. on the time of day. You know, we tend to wake up in the morning with a very, very dry mouth. You know, we haven't been hydrated through the night. We're often breathing, you know, through our mouths, especially if we're congested with allergies or whatever. So that dryness in the morning has a huge influence. And it's interesting because when we were learning how to become masters of wine, we used to want everyone to taste in the morning. But in actual fact, that's probably not the best time to taste. It's probably late morning or the middle of the day. for lots of different reasons. Speaker 3 (11:59) And just to finish on saliva, you say there's some more runny, some thicker. What is the best sort of saliva? And can we ourselves improve the quality of our own saliva in any way? Speaker 1 (12:11) Yes, but that will impact on us in other ways. So generally, a more runny sort of saliva has a higher content of amylases, which are enzymes that break down. food particles. So theoretically, if you have more of those enzymes in a runnier saliva, you'll be breaking down the food components more readily and therefore improving the ability of the body to register taste. You can improve saliva flow by using things like gum, sugar-free gum. When you chew sugar-free gum, you can increase your saliva flow rate by a factor of 10. But only for as long as the taste of the chewing gum lasts, which is about 20 minutes. And then after that, you just get a sore jaw. And you Speaker 3 (12:58) talked about the tongue and how many taste buds we have. How can we maximize the benefits of our tongue as well when we're tasting? Speaker 1 (13:07) Well, that will vary very much on how you look after your mouth. So it's not such a big thing here. And I'm