Dr Vino's wine blog

Vinopic, a new wine retailer in Britain has developed a way to rank wines based on their health-giving properties. Red wines are sold with an IQ score, or Intrinsic Quotient, devised by Roger Corder. The site says that the score rewards wines with “higher quality” and polyphenols while penalizing wines with higher alcohol, sugar, and sulfites.

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?

Even the recession did not lay waste to Americans’ love of wine: per capita consumption continued to increase the past couple of years even if the average per bottle price declined. Over the holiday, I found a curious cause of cutbacks that actually led to trading up: the waist.

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…

As pollen showers down this time of year, a question that many allergy sufferers may have is whether alcohol exacerbates sniffling and sneezing. The answer is yes, but not necessarily for reasons they may think.

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 (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.

Related: “CONTAINS SULFITES: meant to frighten rather than inform“

SIPT: white wine
White wine has not ridden the good-for-you train as far, fast or as well as red wine. Yesterday, white wine almost suffered derailment. First, German researchers said that the higher acidity in white wine could damage teeth! (Vigonier begs to differ.) Then, another study of suggested that of all alcoholic drinks, white wine had the biggest impact on women’s fertility in IVF. The Worldwide White Wine Council will issue a new statement shortly.

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!

SIPPED: wine
Bloomberg reports : “Half a glass of wine a day may add five years to your life, a new study suggests. Drink beer, and you’ll live only 2 1/2 years longer.” Take that, resveratrol pill–a lot more fun!

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!

Remember resveratrol and its life extending qualities, guilt-free gluttony and cardiovascular-improving sloth in laboratory mice? Oh yeah, that was if had the equivalent of 35 bottles of red wine a day.

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: discussion!
Eric Asimov of the NYT had a thoughtful article in Wednesday’s paper about exposing teenagers to wine in the home. It’s great to see a constructive discussion (325 comments long!) on his blog about fostering wine enjoyment in the home rather than the usual discussion of excesses. Related: we’ve discussed kids at wineries and how appropriate is the drinking age of 21 here. [NYT]

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.