While that might be good for the brain, to know that there’s no addiction, apparently the liver is indifferent or confused. A story in yesterday’s copy of The Independent quoted a doctor as saying it is “medically futile” to stop drinking for a month thinking it can atone for previous overconsumption. The head of the British Liver Trust (the English BLT?) says “You are better off making a resolution to take a few days off alcohol a week throughout the entire year than remaining abstinent for January only.”

I try to take a day or two a week with no drinking or tasting. In part, it’s to spare my liver and in part because I am too busy running around. Whatever the reason, I feel it is a sort of reset, that makes me more excited to taste wine on those days that I do.

What are your steps to moderation? Have your say in the poll or the comments!

The whole constellation is being called into question now that “le binge drinking” has arrived in France. Surprisingly, an NPR story specifically mentions the arrival of youth binge drinking as a failure of permissive parenting. I still cling to the idea that learning about wine en famille can provide a good base for moderation–these teens are slamming vodka, after all. Binge drinking is a complex phenomenon with many influences ranging from physiological, social, economic to even policy itself (some argue that a more restrictive policy fuels the binge mentality). Still, its rise in France means that national policy now allows only those 18 and up to purchase drinks. And some towns such as Lyons are placing bans on the sale of alcohol from 10 PM – 6 AM. Even though wine has been considered different from other alcoholic beverages–it has even been considered as food in France–it is obviously affected by the new policies.

It’s sad to see that France, where wine has been seen as the national drink and even as a part of the national image, has now ended up shifting closer to where we are in practice and policy. But they do have a president who doesn’t even drink wine. Who knows, maybe they will even have a list of party schools soon.

The short answer is: yes. Wine is made from grapes, not grains.

In a couple of rare instances, wine could come in contact with gluten at two points during winemaking. Apparently, barrels once had a flour-based paste to smooth the joints on barrel heads; the practice today is far from uniform. If you have a doubt, opt for a wine that doesn’t see any time in small, oak barrels, such as a Riesling. Further, gluten could be used to fine the wine, but other forms of protein, such as egg whites, are used more often. Even if a winemaker used a gluten-based substance for fining, the point of fining is to clarify the wine: the fining substance drifts through the wines, collects any unwanted particles and falls out to the bottom of the tank where it is left behind. Research using mass spectronomy found there to be less than 10 parts per million in finished (bottled) wine, below the 20ppm threshold for a food to be considered gluten-free.

Current labeling laws do not mandate that wines that come in contact with gluten are labeled as such. But the chances are pretty slim that any wines actually contain gluten. Thus it will be interesting to see if, going forward, more wines tout their gluten-free status on the label to tie-in with the food trend.

“Protective Effect of Structurally Diverse Grape Procyanidin Fractions against UV-Induced Cell Damage and Death,” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

While I am sure that the site will become a popular destination (particularly among Google searchers seeking the fountain of youth), my general reaction is: so what? Wine may play a part in a healthy diet. And I have met a lot of people (mostly over 50) who say they only drink red wine because of the resveratrol. But I would never buy a wine solely based on whether it’s healthier for me. I’d rather eat a high-fiber, low-cholesterol diet, go for a run, drown in a bowl of blueberries–something, anything–rather than drink a steady stream of Madiran, a wine high in polyphenols. Nothing against Madiran, its just that there are too many interesting Rieslings wines to be limited to reds. Buying wine for health reasons: It’s the kind of thing that makes me sick.

What do you think? Even though the US regulatory authorities prohibit selling a wine on health claims, would you buy one based on perceived health value?

A relative told me that he (!) has been doing the Weight Watchers system of dieting and weight management for a number of years. In nutshell, Weight Watchers assigns foods and drinks “points” partially based on calories and lets participants eat what they want as long as they stay below the daily points threshold. But Weight Watchers recently recalculated their points system; and the new “PointsPlus” doubled the points of a 4 oz glass of wine from two to four. Sacre bleu!

As a result, my relative said that he was buying better wine since he was drinking less of it. Gone are the $12 malbecs of yore (he said he was getting tired of malbec anyway) and now he’s spending $19 or $20 on a bottle at his local store in order to hopefully get a better wine. He said that he is enjoying the exploration but doesn’t always think that he gets a wine that’s commensurably better even though he’s spending 50-80% more on wine.

What do you think: is drinking less, but better, the way to go for a variety of reasons? Personally, I always prefer more wine and better wine, but that can’t always be done…

Last week, the Times ran a short piece assessing the claim “alcohol worsens allergies.” Their conclusion was yes, particularly for women.

But the problem is not always the alcohol itself. Beer, wine and liquor contain histamine, produced by yeast and bacteria during the fermentation process. Histamine, of course, is the chemical that sets off allergy symptoms. Wine and beer also contain sulfites, another group of compounds known to provoke asthma and other allergy-like symptoms.

I tweeted about it, curious if anyone had any reactions. I heard back from Sumit Bhutani, M.D., a board certified allergist at Allergy & Asthma Associates in Houston and wine enthusiast (and site reader!). In follow-up emails, he took issue with the treatment in the Times piece for lumping all nasal symptoms as allergies, whether they are or not, and placing undue causality on the histamines and sulfites in wine.

He says that histamines in foods have nothing to do with allergic reactions to those foods, so the amount of histamines in foods is almost never of value to allergists. He sent me a link to this observational study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology entitled “No correlation between wine intolerance and histamine content of wine.”

As to sulfites causing allergies or asthma, Dr. Bhutani says that sulfites cause respiratory symptoms in the small portion of the population already sensitive to them. For them, most whom already have asthma, the reactions are often severe forms of bronchospastic symptoms and may include anaphylactic reactions (hence the government warning; you can assess your sensitivity to sulfites by eating five dried apricots, which often have higher levels of sulfites than a glass of wine.) He included a link to another study that tested the theory of low-sulfite and high-sulfite wines in patients with a reported history of asthmatic sulfite reactions. There was no objective drop in the subjects’ breathing test with either wine.

So does the alcohol itself worsen allergies? Dr. Bhutani suggests that when someone’s allergies are flared, alcohol can act as a congestant (a direct vasodilator, in his terms; because it is related to blood-alcohol levels, lower-alcohol wines should cause less congestion.). It’s similar to the way that people with allergies experience increased symptoms around other irritants such as second-hand smoke or strong scents. But he cautions that these indirect irritants are causes of allergy-like symptoms (called rhinitis), not allergies per se. He says that women are affected by this condition three times more than men.

Pity the wine tasters, critics and amateurs alike, that suffer from allergies who may be compounding their problems by tasting at certain times of the year. But if you don’t have allergies, it’s not likely the cause of congestion.

SPIT: Iron and SIPPED: tannins
Tannins have always gotten the bad rap for mucking up red wine pairings with fish. But it turns out that it’s actually the iron! Read Ray Isle’s funny take on the research.

SPIT: the frontal cortex
“we shouldn’t expect our poor olfactory cortex to be able to reliably assign an exact point score…” [Scienceblogs]

SIPPED: Spooky decorations
TheSnarkHunter points us to this seasonal wine shop display at Biondivino in San Francisco; if you know of other good ones, hit the comments!

SPIT: red meat
The New York Times reports on another study: “the men and women who consumed the most red and processed meat were likely to die sooner.”

Maybe that’s why red meat needs wine–a net effect on mortality?

In 1991, the CBS show “60 Minutes” ran an influential segment of possible health benefits of red wine. Entitled “The French Paradox,” correspondent Morley Safer looked at how on earth the French could eat high fat food, such as cheese, and have low rates of heart failure. Research concluded the key variable was not only the type of fat but also red wine. The resulting demand for red wine, the New York Times wrote a few years later, was seen as “potentially the biggest boon to the wine industry since the repeal of Prohibition.”

Morely Safer was at it again earlier this evening, talking about red wine and lab rats. The subject of the piece tonight was about resveratrol (it’s everywhere!), a component found naturally in red wine that may hold the key to a longer, more slothful life in concentrated pill form, not necessarily wine. So great is the potential for the company making the pills, Sirtris, that Glaxo Smith Kline acquired them for $720 million last year. The pills are five years from being on the market they say in the piece.

Anyway, I’ll leave you to explore tonight’s 12 minute segment over on CBS. Here instead is a flashback to see the original four-minute segment from 1991. How naive we were then, back before certain types of fats were taxed! And how funny that the story features the French paradox and they show bottles of Lopez de Heredia from Rioja!

Such is the premise for a hysterical essay in the “shouts and murmurs” column in the New Yorker. The author, Noah Baumbach, pretends to go on a bender with his mouse and the drunk dialing, sloth-inducing binge is well worth the read. It’s even better than my screenplay, Strange Cru.

SIPPED and SPIT: NYC wine bars
Closing tonight is Divine Wine Bar East. Zagat reports they have having the Mother of All Happy Hours tonight to liquidate (ha) the inventory. Opening: Bowery Wine Company and the new wine lounge at Le Cirque. See the action on the NYC wine bar map!

SIPPED: The audacity of nope
French President Sarkozy, a self-proclaimed teetotaler (although see here and here for evidence to the contrary), has the nerve to ask to see the wine list at Windsor Palace before a state dinner. [Times of India]

SIPPED: resveratrol
“Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that resveratrol, a natural antioxidant found in grape skins and red wine, helps to destroy cancerous pancreatic cells by crippling the diseased cells’ mitochondria, the minute organelles found in the majority of living cells which provide them with energy.” [FT.com]

Image: fair-use is made of a reduced size crop of an image that appeared in the NYT attributed to Lisa Adams.

SPIT: the hippocampus!
Wine drinkers have a 10 percent smaller hippocampus than those who drink spirits or beer, researchers say! But I thought “Red wine antioxidants protect hippocampal neurons against ethanol-induced damage“! Ugh, my brain hurts.

SPIT: Chinese wine!
“Millions of Chinese will be disappointed by their first taste of wine” is Jancis Robinson’s assessment of home-grown wines in China. Reporting on a recent trip, she, too, was “disappointed” by the “chemical and occasionally rotten odours” in the wines and general lack of progress with the industry over the past five years. [FT]

SIPPED: Holy wine
In Manchester they may go for Fairtrade wine, but Craig Heffley and Seth Gross of Wine Authorities, a wine retailer in Durham, NC, have another goal in mind for the Duke Chapel: tasty. They plan to start selling a 3L bag-in-box next summer for use in the Eucharist. [Durham News]

SPIT: drinking wine
“The 2006 Insolia from Feudo Principi di Butera…can be pleasurably inhaled for minutes.” Going easy on the hippocampus, was he? [NYT]

SIPPED: understatement
Talk about an impossible food wine pairing! Wine critic and blogger Peter Liem visits a sake festival in Japan and eats live shrimp: “My first two passed complacently, but a third, a female full of salty-sweet roe, twitched a little as I decapitated her with my fingers.” What’s his title for this juicy posting? “Niigata Prefecture.” Tony Bourdain, your job is safe–for now!–until Peter recruits a headline writer from Gawker… [peterliem]

image

And for all that is wonderful about wine, beer and liquor, they clearly bring some heavy costs. Right now, the patchwork of alcohol taxes isn’t coming close to covering those costs — the costs of drunken-driving checkpoints, of hospital bills for alcohol-related accidents and child abuse, and of the economic loss caused by death and injury. Last year, some 17,000 Americans, or almost 50 a day, died in alcohol-related car accidents. An additional 65,000 people a year die from other accidents, assaults or illnesses in which alcohol plays a major role.

Wine has ethyl alcohol in it so it contributes to these statistics. But the argument has floated around for centuries that wine is consumed differently than beer and spirits. Since at least the time of Thomas Jefferson, wine has had advocates who see wine as a drink of moderation since it is mostly consumed with food.

Further, since about 1991 when “60 Minutes” popularized the notion of the “French paradox,” there have been many studies underscoring the health benefits of wine, particularly the role of tannins. Heck, resveratrol extends life and promises fat-free gluttony!

So what do you say, does wine still deserve a sin tax? Of course, Cook does not take into account the fact that wine geeks already have been paying a “tax” called the declining dollar. Sobering indeed.

And if we’re opening the discussion of taxes and wine, there’s always the environmental cost of the wine industry in the form of greenhouse gases. A carbon tax, perhaps?

Well although I am a doctor, I’m not that kind of doctor. But I know where to turn. So I sat down with Geoff Kalish, MD who used to write a column about wine and health for the Wine Spectator.

Dr. Vino: So which is more caloric, red or white?

Dr. Kalish: Neither. The color of the wine makes no difference on the calories.

Dr. V: Aha! A red herring. So what does make one glass of wine more caloric than another?

Dr. K: Primarily, the alcohol level. A four ounce glass of wine at 12 percent alcohol has about 120 calories; the same size with a wine 14 percent alcohol has about 140-160 calories; a 16 percent alcohol wine, about 160-190 calories.

Dr. V: Holy Turley, Batman! What about residual sugar in a wine? Does that make a difference in the calories?

Dr. K: Not as much as alcohol.

Dr. V: What about moscato d’Asti at 5.5% alcohol and lots of sugar?

Dr. K: Sugar provides many less calories per gram than does alcohol (4 compared to 7). Moscato is a lower calorie wine. That, prosecco, brut zero Champagne are all low calorie wine choices. It’s zinfandel, amarone, some California chardonnays, for example, that have higher calories because of the alcohol level.

Dr. V: So should people watching their weight cut wine out as an easy way to reduce calories?

Dr. K: No. Research has shown a small amount of wine in a weight loss plan can actually act as an appetite suppressant, in part because of the alcohol level as well as the pectin content. However, young, tannic reds appear not to have this effect, so aim for a wine that is 11 – 12% alcohol and not overly tannic.

Dr. V: Interesting. I thought red wine was overall the “healthier” wine because of those tannins.

Dr. K: Tannins may have other health benefits but this is just in terms of acting as an appetite suppressant.

Dr. V: All right, thanks. And bottoms up with a dry chenin blanc!