wine and health

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 distinctl...

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...