wine and health

   Dismissing decades of research on alcohol and health, the UK’s new stringent guidelines on drinking bring to mind a quote from champagne lover Sir Winston Churchill: “Statistics are like a lamppost to a drunk; used more for support than illumination.” In announcing the new policy, England’s chief medical officer and neo-prohibitionist Sally Davies scorned the idea that a daily glass of wine could be healthy, proclaiming it an “old wives’ tale” and suggesting a cup of tea instead. The policy is said to be based on the latest statistics, but do these truly shed any new light? We are hardly in the dark about the effects of wine on health, with many thousands of research papers on record.    Davies’ fundamental mistake is to judge all types of drinking the same while focusing the outcome narrowly on cancer, failing to consider the opposite: that an equally narrow focus on wine drinkers might have different outcomes when overall health is concerned. Nothing in the...

     Much ado has been made about a recent article documenting that the alcohol content in wines is often higher than stated on the label, and increasing. It’s been an open secret among winemakers for some time, but if the trend continues it threatens the whole concept of healthy drinking. Policymakers in the UK and elsewhere are already using it to bolster anti-drinking campaigns.      The analysis, from the University of California Davis and others, was comprehensive and included several factors.  Over the past 2 decades, Old World wines have seen a greater increase in alcohol levels, but New World wines started out higher. Using heat index climate data, the authors found that part of the increase correlated to warmer growing conditions (resulting in higher sugar content translating into more alcohol), and part driven by consumer preference for riper wines with more concentrated flavors. Several factors contribute to the trend and confusion ...