When Wine Hurts
Sometimes drinking wine can be a real pain.
When organising dinner with a girlfriend and her new beau, my decadent plans (a bottle of sangiovese with slow-roasted veal ragu over handmade pappardelle) came a cropper when she dropped the bombshell: “I can’t have any red wine because it gives me a headache”.
We all have friends and family members who have sworn off red wine for fear of crashing headaches. Sulfites and preservatives in wine get most of the blame, but the likely culprits are pesky phenolics – contained mostly in red wines.
Phenolics and histamines are found in the skins, stems and pips of grapes. They bleed into the wine during the winemaking process when the grapes are crushed and left to ferment. (Unfortunately, the antioxidants that make red wine a heart-healthy drink are in the grape skins, but you’re not drinking wine purely as a health tonic, are you?)
White grapes have phenolic compounds as well, but as the grape skins are discarded when making white wine, they rarely contain enough to cause trouble.
Whites aren’t totally off the hook though – phenolic compounds can also be extracted from the oak barrels used to ferment and mature some white wines, such as chardonnay.
So if you’re prone to wine-induced headaches, stay away from really dark-coloured red wines. Stick to a red wine with low tannins, or reds made without much contact with grape skins. Pinot noir, being a thinner-skinned grape, might be a better choice for you. Rosés and gamays (or a French beaujolais) should cause no trouble as they don’t macerate with the skins for too long when being made. Rosés are a perfect refresher for our climate and our preferences for eating outdoors, and today’s crop of pinks aren’t as sweet and thin as the ones our parents used to drink.
For my money, the best rosés in Australia are Charlie Melton’s Rose of Virginia and Turkey Flat’s rosé, but if you seek out a French one they’ll be even drier.
The concentration of phenolics in a grape’s skin increases with sunlight – so there’s a good chance a red wine from a cool climate would contain less headache triggers than a gutsy, warm-climate one.
But here’s some unexpected cheer: it’s not actually the cheap reds that will give you problems! The wines with more extracts from the grapes and that spend more time in the barrel are more likely to be the pricier, labour-intensive blockbusters. Embrace your new wine preferences and enjoy the savings.
If these red wines still cause headaches, stick to unoaked whites (typically any white but a chardonnay). Avoid fortified wines (such as port and Rutherglen muscat) like the plague.
If none of these measures work for my headache-prone friend, I’ll know she has an allergic reaction to the preservatives within wine.
Despite the bad press, only 1 per cent of the population are affected by sulfites, although asthmatics tend to be more sensitive to them. There’s no such thing as a sulfite-free wine: small amounts are naturally produced during the winemaking process, although extra servings are added to help preserve the wine and kill bacteria. Finding a wine in Australia without sulfur dioxide on the label – as preservative 220 – is practically impossible, although some winemakers have tried to minimise its use.
It’s easy to identify if sulfites are your pain trigger: white wines will affect you more than reds. If reds are your bugbear, you don’t have a sulfite allergy. Honest.
At the risk of putting you to sleep (or being accused of pushing you to drink), you can minimise wine headaches by following a few sensible rules: don’t drink without food (starch and oils line the stomach beautifully) and drink plenty of water while sipping the wine.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can recommend to avoid headaches caused by overindulgence … those ones you’re just going to have to wear.
From: http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/the_sweet_life/006279.html
