Potential anticaries activity of wine

In antiquity wine was considered to have health benefits. The positive effects on temper and health and also the properties to enhance the storage and to make edible to many foods were particularly esteemed. Recent studies, carried out in the last decade, have confirmed that moderate wine drinking might reduce the risk of gastroenteric infection caused by entero-pathogenic bacteria and demonstrated that wine showed antibacterial activity against Helicobacter pylori. On these basis and considering that wine is often consumed many times during the day and during meals, we explored the antibacterial activity of wine against bacteria which undermine oral cavity health due to important role in caries development. To this purpose two commercial Italian wines, a red wine and a white wine, were tested for antibacterial activity against nine oral Streptococci. Both wines were proved to be active against several Streptococci, among which S. mutans that is the most important aetiological agent for the caries. Further investigations showed that the antibacterial activity of wine was not due neither to the ethanol content, nor to the acidic pH induced by wine in the culture medium, nor to wine polyphenols. The wine component separation carried out by dialysis and solid phase extraction, permitted to point out the responsible for the antibacterial activity that were acetic, citric, lactic, malic, succinic and tartaric acids, which occur in grapes or are produced during malolactic fermentation. Therefore, considering that caries is a multifactorial pathology, that needs the presence and the colonization of pathogen bacteria to develop, we can attribute to wine a potential anticaries activity due to the antibacterial activity of the organic acids occurring in the beverage.