If You Drink Wine and are chasing Health, read on …

Have you ever thought about what is actually in wine?

Wine has no nutrition label or ingredients label. So how, as consumers do we know what we are really drinking?

If you are reading this blog, I am anticipating that you already have an interest or are becoming increasingly more conscious of what’s in your food. Has that same inquiring awareness prompted questions about what’s in the wine we drink? Or what and how alcoholic beverages will fit into your health scheme?

Under the guise of ‘health’ we honour grass-fed meat, wild-caught fish, and organically-grown vegetables, but we blindly accept additives and chemicals in our wine. Why would we allow that sacrifice to our health?

If health, energy, performance (mental and physical) and freedom are important to you, it makes sense to be choosing the cleanest possible foods. It’s now time to start doing the same with your wine.

Unearthing both the upside and the downside of including wine in a healthful lifestyle is a new discovery project for me and thus far, here is what I have discovered;

What’s really in wine?

Sadly, a lot of chemicals, additives, metals, animal products, sugars, and more. Many of these are known to be toxic to our health.

The good news is that the presentation of a healthier way is on offer!

Wines that meet the following criteria not only taste amazing, they leave you feeling great, are better for your health, support passionate family farmers, and are better for the environment. All the things I hold closely to my heart!

No surprises that soil is important. Organic or Biodynamic Farming cultivates a healthy soil. Soil is teeming with beneficial bacterial life. These microorganisms and the grape vines have an important symbiotic relationship that enhances the plant’s capacity to absorb nutrients. Many modern vineyards spray chemicals — pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers — over their plants. Not only do these kill the life in the soil but they often end up in your wine.

Unveiling the parallels of animal farming and wine farming practices has been alarming. Disputable animal husbandry regarding antibiotic doping to speed up growth and to allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions they’re put in became visible in plant agriculture, as I probed the accepted modus operandi viticulture. Antibiotics have been used since the 1950s to control certain bacterial diseases of high-value fruit, vegetable, and ornamental plants. With an increasing intensification of viticulture, chemical weed control within and between grapevine rows seems now to be widely employed. Herbicides are used to lessen competition for water and nutrients caused by weeds, to avoid trunk damage caused by mechanical weeding machinery, and to reduce working time spent in the vineyard. As a result of their wide use, herbicide residues can be found in considerable amounts in ground and surface waters as well as in wine itself.

Graciously, organic and biodynamic farmers support the life in their farms, including the life in the soil. They use compost, compost teas, green manure, and cover crops to fertilize rather than synthetic fertilizers, they do appear to use mechanical weeding rather than herbicides, and they have grazing chickens and livestock to keep insects in check rather than spray insecticides.

Organic farms produce crops exactly as nature intended. I suggest that those are the grapes you want in your wine.

Dry-farmed wines get their water from natural rainfall. Irrigated vines are dripped water from tubes tied to the plants and provides higher yields (aka, more profits) and sweeter wines. Drip irrigation encourages roots to stay near the surface where their water is pooling. Their roots usually only grow a few feet deep. Dry-farming, on the other hand, requires the roots to dig deeper to search for water, often up to 30 feet underground. Deeper roots interact with more microorganisms in the soil. They have access to more nutrients. They support healthier vines that eventually produce richer, more complex wines … (tick and tick from me!).

Wine is fermented grapes. Healthy vineyards should produce grapes that need no alteration as they already have everything they need to become wine. But in the fast paced, high demand world that too many people support …. the wine industry has surrendered to the demand for more consistency and faster produce at a lower cost. Chemistry has taken possession of the once beautifully simple process of grape fermentation, to fabricate a drinkable miscellany.

Are you aware that the FDA approves over 75 additives for use in wine making? Just Google search - ‘FDA approved additives in wine’, I suspect that you will be as unnerved as I. These additives may change flavors, add coloring, increase sweetness, be used as starters in the fermentation process and the list goes on.

Sugar Chaptalization is the process of adding sugar to grape juice in order to increase the final alcohol level in the finished wine. Adding sugar doesn’t make a wine sweeter because the sugar is consumed by the yeast when it is fermented into alcohol. Chaptalization can add up to 3% ABV (alcohol by volume) to a wine. You may initially like that thought but please come back to what it is you are ultimately chasing … health, vitality and freedom from suffering. There are many espoused cardiovascular and neurological benefits to modest alcohol consumption. In this regard, natural fermentation, low alcohol wines feel like the better choice. Low alcohol wines allow you to enjoy the benefits and taste of wine without feeling like you just got slugged over the head the following day. Dosage really matters on all things that we eat and drink. We really have to be mindful about the measure.

As a health advocate I now espouse drinking wines (that is if you actually want to drink wine, I am not suggesting that you should consume wine to be healthy, that start with healthy grapes and happy yeast, and then have nothing added and nothing removed.

I will also point you in the direction of the Wine Label. The only thing required to be printed on a wine label is the alcohol percentage and that’s not even required to be accurate. By law, the actual alcohol percentage in a bottle of wine can be 1-1.5% greater than or less than what’s stated on the bottle. Just like we all demand transparency in our food, so too should we demand transparency in our wine. That’s why it’s best to find wines that have been independently lab tested.

My central objective is to prompt you to ask more questions, internally and externally about the wine or any alcohol that you are drinking. Because what has happened in our food supply is what is happening in our wine industry. Mass corporate consolidation and large industrial farming within the industry is being driven by greed. Just as you center your food choices around your core values and you ask questions to confirm this, make sure that you are also asking these questions of your alcohol choices and exacting the answers that align with your values and priorities.