wine and health

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Last month’s Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla coincided with a charitable event called the Walla Walla Wine Walk Weekend, and it got me thinking again about the role that wineries play in charity and gratitude. I enjoyed all of the sessions at the WBC (now renamed the Wine Media Conference), but decided to a bit of a different tack and check out the charity auction event instead of the Friday evening WBC winery dinners. (Plus they had dancing!) My wife and I helped kick off the weekend’s festivities, which ended up raising over $40,000 for the Walla Walla Alliance for Homelessness. On Saturday wine blogger conference participants were joined by over 300 people at tasting rooms around downtown, sampling wines from 17 participating wineries all donating to the cause. But Walla Walla wineries aren’t unique in their generosity; with their participation and others across Washington State, this year’s Auction of Washington Wines in August raised more than $4 million to benefit Sea

I enjoyed participating in the recent Wine BloggersConference in Walla Walla, where I gave a talk on wine and health, and I have been looking for a way to tie it all together. Since I write about wine and health, I’m in a niche slot. I don’t review wines, like most bloggers at the conference, and I don’t write about lifestyle per se. But I believe I have found the link, albeit unexpectedly, in the Wine and Cheese Pairing with Cheeses of Europe session! The “Cheese Twins” gave a dynamic and entertaining presentation but usually I think of cheese in the same category as wine and alcohol: Justifiable indulgences but not what most would consider health food. Then I remembered a paper from a few years ago that suggested that cheese, not wine, may actually be the basis of the French Paradox. How cheese might explain the French Paradox     Here’s the idea, as proposed by in a 2012 publication [i] in the journal Medical Hypotheses:   The French Paradox is distinctly French, with

Who doesn’t know someone who swears they can drink wines when they are in Europe but has a reaction to wine back home? Theories abound as to why this occurs, but none of them completely explains the problem. Suspect sulfites? Maybe, but that is almost certainly not the issue for most. Pesticides possibly? A tasting room server pressed that idea on me recently, claiming that American winemakers use more of them and they accumulate in our fat tissue over our lifetime, increasing our sensitivity to them. But evidence suggests otherwise, at least as far as pesticide use is concerned. Is it lower alcohol content? There is a persuasive case to be made for that, but as European winemakers chase higher scores, the alcohol content increases there too. Each of these premises may apply to some degree, but I have another idea to toss into the mix: I think that when we are in Europe, we drink differently. We are probably on vacation, and we are more relaxed. We are more likely to drink in a tradi

I wanted this blog to be about the healthy role of wine in everyday life that I observed on my trip to Austria and Hungary last week, not the latest salvo against alcohol from another big study . It’s getting tiresome seeing an important issue being muddled in the search for clarity, and I don’t like the idea that a reasonable person viewing the same data but seeing something else might be seen as an apologist for the alcohol industry. Yet the same mistakes endure, both in the studies themselves and the reporting on them. They are technically correct and fundamentally wrong at the same time. First the happy part: What I saw in Europe, as I have on previous trips, was a view of wine as a normal part of everyday life. Wineries are still often family businesses, with everyone contributing. At a winery in the Etyek region of Hungary we were served by the owners and their teenage daughter. In our wine tasting group was a 20-year old woman from Finland, on holiday with her mother and

France’s health minister Agnès “buzzkill” Buzyn   has again provoked the ire of the wine industry with a new proposal to require a large red warning label on all bottles, admonishing pregnant women to avoid all alcohol and reminding buyers of the legal age limit (18) for drinking. A coalition of 64 of France’s top winemakers are pushing back, declaring in a letter to Le Figaro that this is nothing less than an affront to the soul of their country. As translated by British newspaper The Telegraph, the letter implores their countrymen to recognize the importance of the “thousands of tourists [who] come to discover this France, bosom of the art de vivre that is the envy of the world and where wine plays a leading role.” They mourn the prospect of bottles defaced “with labels covered in lugubrious and deathly signs.” Warning labels are already required in France as in many other countries, but the size is not specified; Buzyn want a 2 cm (about an inch) wide red banner. I cringe at the

Not long after enrolling the first patients in the much hyped prospective study on alcohol and health, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they were pulling the plug. I am actually more surprised that they ever got it off the ground in the first place. As I wrote a year ago when the study was still in its planning stages, there were too many competing interests, criticisms of the study design, and concerns about funding to expect that whatever results came out would be universally accepted. Nevertheless, I am disappointed. The study, called Moderate Alcohol and Cardiovascular Health Trial (MACH) was intended to provide hard evidence about the health effects of moderate alcohol consumption by prospectively assigning subjects with heart disease to one drink per day or not drinking, which they were to follow for up to 10 years. Most existing data on the question is retrospective, or simply tracks a subject population according to their drinking preferences, w

It seems that the more studies we see on the relationship between wine and health, and the larger they are, the more contradictory the results. Headlines summarizing comprehensive international studies declare the French paradox dead, and all alcoholic beverages are equally detrimental. I think there is an overlooked explanation for this: over the past several decades, convergence of drinking patterns around the world has separated wine from its role as a daily part of a meal. Globalization has commoditized our views about drink, toppling it from its role as a culturally specific emblem. Global convergence of drinking There are several recent reports summarizing the trend, [i] , [ii] , [iii] and it applies for both developed and developing countries. Since the early 1960s, wine’s share of global alcohol consumption has more than halved, declining from 35% to 15%. Beer and spirits have taken up the slack, with beer gaining 42% and spirits adding 43%, both large gains. The b

Europeans have their daily wine, Asians their tea, but it has been estimated that the primary source of dietary antioxidants for the average American is coffee . An impressive lineup of scientific articles attests to coffee’s health benefits, but in March 2018 a California judge ruled that coffee roasters and retailers will have to post a cancer warning label. According to a group called The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a chemical called acrylamide that forms in trace amounts during roasting is potentially carcinogenic. Citing a law passed in 1986 known as Proposition 65, they sued Starbucks and dozens of other companies. Despite a lack of evidence that acrylamide levels in coffee are enough to cause harm in humans, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled for the plaintiffs. In so doing, he ran counter to guidance from the World Health Organization, which officially dropped coffee from its list of possible carcinogens in 2016.   The WHO’s determination

French health minister Agnès Buzyn recently created a major buzzkill across the winemaking world by denouncing claims that wine could be beneficial and increase longevity. Ms. Buzyn, a hematologist, broke with wine loving President Emmanuel Macron, saying in a television interview that “The French population is led to believe that wine protects them, that it offers benefits that other alcohol does not. Scientifically, wine is an alcohol like any other.” This is true only in the narrowest sense, and wrong in the larger sense. Here’s why: Yes, it’s technically accurate to state that alcohol (ethanol) distilled from wine, beer or spirits is the same, but the conclusion that all beverages are equally detrimental is fallacious. We don’t consume the alcohol independently of the source. The benefits of wine are attached to the lifestyle of moderate consumption with meals; the pattern of drinking matters. But to the larger point, wine’s health benefits are not exclusively derived from

While the bloom may be off the rose for resveratrol as a miracle anti-aging molecule, there’s more to the story. Spin-offs of this wine-derived compound have recently been shown to reverse some fundamental changes in cellular aging in ways that the parent compound doesn’t. Resveratrol came to be a sort of celebrity molecule when it was demonstrated to activate genetic “switches” called sirtuins, which mediate the lifespan-extending effects of caloric restriction. But in the end it turned out that resveratrol is not a direct sirtuin activator, and experiments in animals other than primitive organisms failed to consistently replicate the effect. Resveratrol levels in wine and other dietary sources are too low to explain wine’s association with longevity anyway; secondly, when taken as a supplement it is rapidly metabolized into other compounds. But the concept of activating anti-aging genes opened new avenues of research, and new possibilities began to take shape. How splicing fac

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, this month we will take a diversion from the usual hard science topics relating to wine and health and look at wine’s affinity with love and long life. Some of the most famous writers have penned paeans to wine, including the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. His 1954 Ode to Wine weaves a numinous daydream about life with sensuous romance: “…wine, starry child of the earth” he writes, “full of wonder, amorous” and “…at the least, you must be shared.” No drinking alone for this guy, not if there is a friend or lover to celebrate with. He goes on: “My darling, suddenly/the line of your hip/becomes the brimming curve/of the wine goblet,/your breast is the grape cluster,/your nipples the grapes,/the gleam of spirits lights your hair,” and finally “your love is an inexhaustible/cascade of wine,/light that illuminates my senses,/the earthly splendor of life.”  Irish poet William Butler Yeats, himself a 1923 literature No

This Friday Feb 2 nd is the annual “wear red” day in Canada and the U.S. to raise awareness for women’s heart health. Why only a day for the number one threat to women’s health? Women are 5 times more likely to succumb to heart disease than breast cancer, which gets a whole month (October.) Another contradiction is that the advice women hear about prevention of breast cancer is the opposite of what you can do to lower the risk of heart disease: a daily glass of wine. Even one drink a day raises your risk of breast cancer, we are told, ignoring the overriding benefits of wine on heart health. Drink red wine to live longer Here’s why I think women should also “drink red.” For starters, wine helps de-stress and celebrates life. Stress is a factor in heart disease, and if that were the only way wine helped it would be worth considering. But the medical evidence is also strong: a daily glass of red wine helps raise the HDL “good cholesterol” levels, which lowers the risk of cardiova

The ever-quotable Sir Winston Churchill once said “however beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” and that is especially true for any proposed intervention to improve health and longevity. Whether we are talking about a glass of red wine with dinner or a potential  blockbuster drug, clinical trials are the only objective way to know if it actually works. Drugs are required to prove their safety and effectiveness through prospective, randomized, double-blind trials, meaning that potential bias is minimized.  It’s tougher to do with lifestyle interventions like drinking wine, so we have relied on other types of studies. (These include for example  observationa l or  epidemiologic  studies, which track health outcomes correlating to lifestyle factors.) There are nevertheless a few clinical trials on wine and health worth noting: In 2015 the outcome of a 2-year interventional trial comparing the effects of red or white wine vs. no alcohol was reported in