Wine and Your Health: Getting Real

 Here are two articles on wine and our health:

1. First article: Grapes are a superfood that lower bad chloresterol. Many of their healthy nutrients are also found in wine made from grapes. There are many studies linking moderate wine drinking with better heart health. (There are also many studies linking wine consumption with various other adverse health impacts, and every researcher agrees that wine drinkers should always drink only in moderation.)

2. Second article: How you drink, and how often you drink,  and what your biological gender is, all greatly affects how your liver processes alcohol. Moderate wine consumption (1 to 2 glasses per day, for a man) seems to allow the liver (in most people) to "keep up" in processing the alcohol, whereas weekend drinkers are slamming their livers with alcohol when the liver isn't prepared to receive it. Interesting. So it's not clear that a "dry January" is helpful. Also, due to the effects of estrogen, most women can't process alcohol as well as men can, so more of the alcohol they drink passes into the bloodstream (whereas with men, more of it is "disabled" in the stomach). If the average man and the average woman (even if they weigh the same) drink the same amount of wine, it's likely the woman will have far more blood alcohol than the man. So "moderate consumption" for women is less than what it is for men.

To get real about it: It's important, especially as we get older, to know what "moderate" wine consumption is, for yourself. I've learned how to nurse a single glass of wine through an entire dinner, though I don't do that very often. Also, I believe that hard liquor is much more dangerous for our health than are wine and beer (hard liquor doesn't have the healthy ingredients that grapes do, and with its super-high alcohol levels, it's very important to watch our dosage with hard liquor). I think that, with wine, it's better to consider wines with lower alcohol. Consider a German Riesling from a cool year, where the alcohol might be just 9%, or a Prosecco at 9 to 11%. We should drink less of that 16% Zinfandel at a meal, compared to the amount of a Prosecco that we could drink. Ports should be enjoyed only in small glasses, obviously.

However you decide to proceed, be careful and stay informed!

Climate change and grapes

This article scares me: We're seeing, today, the changes in climate that were recently forecasted for 2050!

There are some big losers in Grapeworld, and, probably, a few winners. Poor Australia, hit with more drought and too much heat. When ripening happens too fast, the flavors don't always have time to mature, and yet the grape must be picked, or else the sugars will be so high it's akin to making vodka, not wine.

Even in the US and Europe, flavors are shifting from the red and purple fruits (which I love, as expressed in wine) to black fruits (which I don't like because they can also include flavors like licorice and tar). And higher summer rainfall caused more humidity, which causes more Powdery Mildew on the grapevines. And we are seeing earlier ripening, in our SW WA vineyard, for sure.

(photo credit: Google images)

Great article on hybrid (modern variety) grapes

This writer, who's a professor at Cornell, really nailed it in this article. We should all be drinking more wines made from modern grape varieties, which give us broader diversity, better disease resistance, and more-interesting flavors. To continue to focus only on evolutionarily-restrained Vitis vinifera (European winegrapes) is to head heedlessly towards extinction, just as is happening with the Cavendish banana.

Yet another reason why modern varieties of grapes are better than the old vinifera varieties

Napa is going to replant about 15% of the whole valley, due to the surprise inability of a rootstock (promoted 20 yrs ago by UC Davis) to withstand Red Blotch Disease.

Read about it here.

This is yet another reason why modern varieties (sometimes called "hybrids", with American grapes in their parentage) are better than vinifera. American grapes have evolved to keep up with the attacks by fungi and viruses, whereas for 2000+ years we have prevented vinifera grapes from evolving (by cutting and rooting them, instead of allowing them to make seeds, and then growing the seeds), so vinifera grapes have not been allowed to develop defenses against new microbe attackers.