HERE are some widely-held misapprehensions about wine and alcohol. Self-confessed buffs will greet most of them with a nod of recognition. Some of the points relate to general health issues but as ever, if you have any query about any aspect of your health, ask your doctor about it.
Screwcaps
A myth still persists in some quarters that poor, cheap wines are the only ones bottled under screwcaps and that a ‘proper’ cork is a sign of a good wine. Not so. As practically every dedicated wine fan knows by now, the twist-off cap is generally a better, more reliable way to seal a wine bottle. And each year, more and more wines on our shelves are bottled that way, led by upmarket wineries in New Zealand and Australia.
Corked wine
There’s a perception that if cork is partly broken, crumbling or damaged, the wine inside will be faulty. Not necessarily.
When we say a wine is ‘corked’ we mean it’s infected with a substance named 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). Produced by fungi, it is harmless, but spoils the wine experience (especially if you’re in the habit of enjoying an occasional sniff as well as a sip) with its off-putting, dank, wet cardboard, rising damp odour. It can infest barrels or even a whole winery. But, crucially, one of the places it flourishes best is within natural cork, hence the slightly confusing word ‘corked’.
The fault was one of the impulses that drove the wine industry to turn to screwcaps.
Alcohol content
There’s a perception that winemakers have been deliberately pumping more and more alcohol into wines in recent decades. Twenty years ago, practically every wine came in at 11.5% to 12.5%, while nowadays they commonly hit 13% and 14%. But in fact, underlying this upward trend is the set of interrelationships among three factors: sugar, alcohol and flavour.
The wine styles we favour nowadays are generally (1) full of ripe fruit flavour and (2) quite dry, as in low in sugar. As you know, the riper any fruit is, the more stuffed with sugar it will be. So grapes bursting with sweet juice are carted off to the winery (generally trailed by a cloud of wasps driven crack-addict crazy by that heady scent) only for most of that sugar to be fermented into lots and lots and lots of alcohol.
Winemakers all over the world have been seeking ways to make modern fruity wines without such a high payload of alcohol. However, it’s not an easy circle to square. Planting in cooler areas; harvesting grapes earlier, and using less efficient strains of yeast are among the key approaches to naturally reduce the sugar/alcohol content. These expedients could help restore the old 11% benchmark. Two wine countries – Germany and Portugal – are awash in good traditional wine styles with around 10% or 11% alcohol ABV. And semi-sweet styles, again particularly from Germany may have even less alcohol.
There have been recent attempts to produce low-alcohol wines, usually by making full strength wine and then mechanically or chemically removing that particular active ingredient. All of the ones I’ve tried are pretty poor and if you want to reduce the alcohol content you’re imbibing, you’d be better off with grape juice, or by adding water to your wine, or drinking less.
Mixing your drinks
We’ve all heard the warning: mixing the grape (wine, brandy, port, sherry) with the grain (beer, whiskey) will cause you terrible after-effects the following day. This is an attribution error of giant proportions. Hangovers are caused by alcohol.
The myth may be grounded in the circumstances the sufferer is most likely to consume both classes of drink – coincidentally involving lots of alcohol. “We went for a few drinks after work and then on to the restaurant where we had a few bottles of wine and a drop of Cognac with the coffee – oh yes and the waiter came round with flaming sambucas on the house and then we went back to the pub for more pints…”
Attributing the problem to the class of drink rather than the quantity of it is a self-deluding get-out clause.
And if I can’t appeal to your common sense, can I please appeal to your incredulity? Just suppose for a moment that each class, grape and grain, does have some magic ingredient which – even after they’ve been denatured by fermentation or distillation – cause people to feel ill when they meet. Well if that is so, please explain to me why the streets aren’t full of people staggering around groaning in pain caused by their breakfast muesli.
Certainly, loading up on a rich, superfluous overdose of nutrients could cause some queasiness, but in my view it’s likely to be infinitesimal compared to the after-effects of too much alcohol.
Wine is good for you
Wine is bad for you
These notions – along with variants such as ‘a glass of red wine a day is good for you’ – aren’t true and aren’t false. But they’re hopelessly, irredeemably useless. And anyone who gets Orwell’s point about the misleading power of the phrase “four legs good, two legs bad” should spot that.
Yet we keep seeing apparently plausible stories suggesting one or the other. It’s only when you take the long view and see all these stories in context that the absurdity emerges. Indeed one website is devoted entirely to aggregating stories in just one newspaper in the ‘X is good for you, Y is bad for you’ genre. Last time I checked, it listed 17 recent stories that wine prevents cancer and 18 that it causes it.
There are some specific health issues – alcoholism being merely the most obvious one – regarding wine that neither I nor any other blogger can help you with, and you really should talk to your doctor if you are in any doubt. But otherwise you should be fine with moderate consumption of alcohol, along with a good varied diet, a bit of exercise, a decent night’s sleep, the company of people who care about you, a good belly laugh, the respect of your peers, etc etc…
Where was I? Oh yes. Wine. There certainly seems to be some deliberate misreporting, compounded by media and blog parroting of the same ‘facts’ taken on trust.
In the yay-boo media, scientists are reduced to panto heroes or villains. They’ve either discovered some magic bullet that’ll help you live longer (yay!) or are foisting some new horror on us – such as mobile phone masts – that’ll kill us all stone dead (boo!).
Much of the problem is the small print, and our reluctance or inability to read it: Scientific research is phrased carefully, and stuffed with caveats and conditions. For instance, a study might demonstrate that a substance isolated from grape skins tends to have certain effects on a certain type of human cells in vitro. And those effects, if replicated in the human body, could potentially have effects that are beneficial to a particular aspect of our metabolism. That is not saying the same thing as the half-page article headlined Study Shows Wine Protects Heart Health, illustrated by that stock shot of a woman tucking into an enormous glass of cabernet.
Population lifestyle studies suggesting that wine drinkers live longer are just as questionable. A brilliant piece of research reported in the British Medical Journal in 2006 demonstrated one way that studies of wine can be confounded by other factors. Researchers in Denmark got the co-operation of some 100 supermarkets and food shops which turned over the data from 3.5 million till receipts.
Trawling through them, they discovered that drinkers in their sample who bought wine (as opposed to other forms of alcohol) were more likely to buy fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, while those who brought other types of alcohol through the checkout were more likely to also buy snacks and fatty processed foods.
What that really tells us is something we may have guessed – for a host of reasons, people buying into home cooking tend to choose wine. That in turn may suggest why wine-drinking seems to be related to longevity. While I certainly don’t see takeaways or snack foods as some sort of lethal poison, I do believe home cooking with fresh ingredients to be positive contributors to wellbeing – as well perhaps as suggesting an enhanced home life. And maybe that is where long life, health and happiness can be found.
Thing is, unlike a bottle of wine, you can’t buy that lifestyle off the shelf for €8. And similarly, the Danish report doesn’t easily fit in to the yay-boo media template of a good story and so was barely mentioned in the mass media. Certainty sells, not subtlety.
‘Contains sulphites’
Sulphites (or sulfites, the American spelling) are naturally-occurring compounds which have been used as a preservative in wine – as well as other foods such as blue cheese and dried fruit – for hundreds of years. You can take it that all wines, including those made from organically-grown grapes, contain sulphites. Oh, and your body naturally produces sulphites. They’re a group of natural, non-toxic compounds.
A small proportion of the population who suffer from asthma may have an adverse reaction to sulphites in the diet, but most of us seem to suffer no ill effects.
It may be technically possible to produce wines that don’t contain sulphites – but they would be tremendously unstable and would perhaps more closely resemble vinegar. Put it this way – I’ve yet to hear of even one sulphite-free wine on the market. And millions of people are drinking wine every day around the world with no problem.
The alarm is caused in part by the warning on wine bottles which screams CONTAINS SULPHITES just like that, in capitals. Given that, surely, anyone with a sulphite intolerance will know that wine always contains the stuff, I believe it’s as helpful as a warning that a tin of tomatoes CONTAINS TOMATOES.
I used to think that the warning should be scrapped entirely. A compromise could entail a requirement for wine producers to label the sulphite content as an average parts per million (ppm) at time of production. There would be understandable industry resistance to such a solution. Unlike, say, soft drinks or prepared meals, wine changes from year to year: the testing and printing costs could be prohibitive, especially to smaller producers. But either solution would be preferable to the current one which generally only serves to frighten people.
Organic wine
Some people believe that wines made from organically-grown grapes taste better, are better for you, and won’t give you a hangover. And yet – having met quite a few organic winemakers and people who sell their wines – I’ve yet to hear one of them make any of these claims.
I am emotionally drawn to organics, and am particularly persuaded by issues of sustainability, and by the notion of producers wresting power from companies that market agricultural inputs. We owe the organic movement a great deal of credit for its key role in putting food quality up the agenda in recent decades. However, I’ve yet to see any evidence of health benefits due to organic production methods.
There’s an ever-growing range of wines on the market approved by one of the various organisations certifying produce as being organic or biodynamic. In its wake comes an even larger slew of wines from producers practicing minimal intervention techniques such as ‘lutte raisonné’, many of which are organic-in-all-but-name. But by not seeking such certification are entitled to use legal insecticides and pesticides.
To the last and most easily demolished point, hangovers. Alcohol is the component that causes hangovers. So a wine made from organically-grown grapes will cause a hangover every bit as powerful as the non-organic type: Falling from an oak tree will not hurt any less than falling from a breeze-block wall. ♦
It’s hardly surprising that a psychoactive, potentially addictive and highly profitable substance should trail a whole slew of mythology in its wake.
Of course alcohol made here in Ireland has to go into bond too. Which reminds me: If you’ve any interest in Ireland, history, society, strong drink or any of the above, would you ever please get a copy of 
