Skip to main content

Big Thank-you to the Indian Wine Academy

I'm just back from my trip to India for an international plastic surgery conference where I was presenting a paper, but I must say that one of the highlights was the opportunity to speak about my book Age Gets Better with Wine at a dinner meeeting of the Indian Wine Academy. A very big thank-you to Subhash Arora for the invitation and the wonderful dinner at Ciro Restaurant in New Delhi this past Monday evening. There is very sophisticated group of wine lovers in India to be sure. One member, Arun Varma, who heads a marketing and travel service company, even had me convinced that wine drinking could be incorporated into Ayurvedic medicine. Why not?
So what about Indian wine? It is a young industry, and there is a lot of potential. Growing regions in the north, where the climate is more temperate, are largely undeveloped but I wouldn't be surprised to see some really good wines in the not-too-distant future.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Revisiting resveratrol: new findings rekindle anti-aging debate

Just when we thought the bloom was off the rosé for resveratrol, the anti-oxidant polyphenol from red wine with multiple anti-aging properties, along comes new research giving life to the debate. But first a bit of background: As I detailed in my book Age Gets Better with Wine , it is well-documented that wine drinkers live longer and have lower rates of many diseases of aging. Much or the credit for this has been given to resveratrol, though there isn’t nearly enough of it in wine to explain the effects. Nevertheless, I dubbed it the “miracle molecule” and when it was reported to activate a unique life-extension phenomenon via a genetic trigger called SIRT, an industry was born, led by Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, quickly acquired by pharma giant Glaxo. The hope was that resveratrol science could lead to compounds enabling people to live up to 150 years and with a good quality of life. But alas, researchers from other labs could not duplicate the results, and clinical studies disa...
7 comments
Read more

Is wine a functional food?

Then again, didn’t all foods used to be functional? In the modern era of bulging waistlines, it would seem that nutrition has taken a back seat to processed foods engineered to tweak our taste buds and pleasure centers in the brain. And it is all too easy – and wrong – to cast wine as merely empty calories. But can we really consider wine to be a food, especially a nutritious one? To begin with, the term “functional food” means that it contains specific nutrients with identifiable health benefits. Sometimes these are added in, as with vitamins A and D in milk or calcium in orange juice. The way I see it, in a well-balanced diet there shouldn’t be a need for such enhancements. Wine for example naturally contains an abundance of antioxidant polyphenols, nutritionally vital ingredients that are increasingly lacking in many foods. A glass of wine with dinner on a daily basis is associated with longer life and better health by a variety of measures, a claim difficult to prove with vita...
4 comments
Read more