A Glass A Day Keeps The Doctor Away?

Is wine good for your health? Well, I’m in danger of sticking my neck out here, so lets get a couple of things straight first:

1. Everything in moderation (including moderation, if you’re Oscar Wilde).

2. Over-indulgence is bound to be more harmful than total abstinence.

3. I write as a qualified wine person, not a qualified medical person.

Right, that’s that out of the way – now for the fun part. Even the father of medicine himself, good old Hippocrates, was recommending wine for various ailments hundreds of years BC. More recently phenomena such as the “French Paradox” have encouraged quite extensive research into the medicinal properties of wine. This “Paradox” manifests itself in the way the French, many of whom have diets high in saturated fats, nevertheless show a low incidence of heart disease when compared globally. Well they drink a lot of red wine, and subsequent studies have shown that red wine in particular contains flavanoids including (deep breath) oligomeric procyanidin, resveratrol, and quercetin, which can either help to prevent hardening of the arteries, or have the potential to help protect against heart disease. In properly regulated quantities wine can also help to balance cholesterol, which is thought to be down to how wine slows digestion, thus preventing some fatty content from entering the bloodstream. So linger over that glass, and savour that flavour.

There’s more. The flavanoids found in wine (particularly red wine) are believed to function as anti-oxidants, and the subsequent inhibition of some free radicals these cause have been shown to reduce the occurrence of some cancers in certain cases – notably of the digestive tract. The real miracle compound, resveratrol, is also thought to have the ability to activate certain longevity genes known as sirtuins, thus slowing down ageing processes. What? It makes us live longer too? I like to think so… There are cardiologists (I know of one in Swindon of all places) who prescribe a little red wine every day to heart patients, in the belief that it reduces the chance of a second heart attack by some 50%. Cabernet Sauvignon is the best at all this, and the Cab Sav that’s made from very high altitude grapes (such as in Argentina) the best of all. Thinner air, more UV on the skins, longer ripening process, making thicker skins and more anti-oxidants.

I could go on – but lets think about moderation for a minute. Because we have to. You may want to keep an eye on your weekly intake, which the UK government has prescribed as 14 units for women, and 21 for men. It’s fairly simple to calculate a unit of alcohol by using the following formula – alcohol content (ABV) x volume (ml) ÷ 1000. By this method we can figure out that a 750ml bottle of wine at 13% alcohol will contain 9.75 units. In other words one large 250ml glass of wine holds more daily units than even men are supposed to have. Oops. To make it plain you’ll find about one unit of alcohol in each of the following: half a 175ml glass of wine; half a pint of 3.5% ABV beer, lager, or cider; 25ml of spirits; 50ml of vermouth. But where wine’s concerned I think the moral of the story is simply to drink less quantity but better quality, which hopefully should even things out on the purse, and enable you to reap all the best of benefits.