Moderate consumption of wine seems to produce positive health effects derived from the occurrence of bioactive polyphenols. The biological properties of polyphenols are greatly dependent on their bioavailability, which, in turn, is largely influenced by their chemical structure and degree of polymerization. There are scientific evidences that gut microbiota play a key role in the production, bioavailability, and biological activities of phenolic metabolites. Concurrently, these metabolites can modulate the colonic microbial population composition and/or activity. Therefore, the study of the benefits to host health of wine polyphenols should be carried out considering the two-way relationship “polyphenols–microbiota.” In general, studies evidence that wine polyphenols are extensively metabolized by gut bacteria into phenolic metabolites that are able to modulate the growth of selected bacterial groups. However, only a limited number of bacterial species have been identified as being implicated in the metabolism of wine polyphenols, most of them belonging to Firmicutes phylum. The emerging high-throughput-omic approaches can contribute to the identification of the bacteria responsible for the polyphenol metabolism as well as the biomarkers and functional outcomes derived from wine consumption, thereby improving the knowledge about the interactions between wine polyphenols and gut microbiota as well as their benefits to human health.

This work was carried out with the fi nancial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (AGL2012-40172-C02-01 project).

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