Tag Archives: wine and health

WC health alert: Beware the Pumpkin Spice Latte

Researcerhs standing at computer screens
“Oh my God, just as we feared — evidence of latte use disorder!”

Don’t the Neo-Prohibitionists know that the coffee drink could be even deadlier than wine with dinner?

Dear Neo-Prohibitionists:

Your argument, in trying to bring back abstinence, is that any amount of alcohol is unhealthy and that we’re addicted to booze as if it was heroin or Oxycontin – Mommy Juice and all of that.

So my question: If you’re so concerned about our health, why aren’t you doing studies and issuing warnings about something that is even deadlier than wine?

The return of the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Because, frankly, that thing scares me to death:

• One serving contains 390 calories, about three times as much as a glass of wine.

• It also has almost half of the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat, about one-fifth of the cholesterol and carbohydrates, 1/10th of the sodium, and more than a third of a day’s safe intake of caffeine.

• Wine, by comparison, contains no fat, no cholesterol, no caffeine, and almost no carbohydrates.

And, since you are so concerned with health, I am sure you know that fat, cholesterol, sodium, and too much sugar (carbs!) are the quickest way to heart disease. Which, as I am also sure you know, is the leading cause of death in the U.S., some 700,000 people each year.

No doubt this has been an oversight on your part, and that we can soon expect studies that say drinking one Pumpkin Spice Latte is the equivalent of smoking a couple of cigarettes, or that two lattes a day is the equivalent of binge drinking. Perhaps you can even coin a term like latte use disorder, based on the wonderfully terrifying “alcohol use disorder.”

So please ponder this the next time you’re in the Starbucks drive-thru, engine idling (and killing the planet), waiting to order your Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Sincerely,
The Wine Curmudgeon

What do the neo-Prohibitionists want?

wine and health
This is the WC’s favorite “we’re all drunk and passed out because all drinking is evil” picture.

Yes, they want us to stop drinking, but is there more going on than that?

Consider the following, which a fellow wine writer received after a recent column:

“There’s no appropriate level of alcohol consumption given that even an infrequent glass of wine or beer will spike cancer and more than an infrequent glass will do lasting liver and brain damage. Fortunately, consumption is falling in America & the best thing would be for it to fall further, faster.”

Hard to read, yes? The absolutes. The certainty. The righteousness. But read it, and know that’s where we are when it comes to alcohol in the the U.S. As a blog reader noted in a comment the other day: “An otherwise trenchant writer in my field (psychotherapy) told his readers that anyone who drinks more than a glass of wine at Christmas dinner is an alcoholic.”

The neo-Prohibitionists have taken control of the discussion, and until the wine business – and its colleagues in beer and spirits – take it back, we’re going to see more and more of this. And yes, it could come to the point where – as one very smart wine writer told me not long ago – drinking will be as much anathema as cigarette smoking.

The irony is that Prohibition was perhaps the greatest social failure in U.S. history. Which, of course, doesn’t matter to the neo-Prohibitionists because they know absolutely and certainly of their righteousness. History won’t dare repeat itself with them.

Frankly, I don’t understand why so many in the wine business are so terrified to call out the neo-Prohibitionists. What are they going to do? Cast a spell and turn everyone into frogs?

Because there are reasons to call them out. A German nutritionist, reported a British trade magazine, said that those of us who drink in moderation are being “stigmatised” by flawed alcohol studies. Nicolai Worm, PhD (who also consults for wine trade groups) was especially critical of research used to show that any alcohol consumption was evil.

Hmm. Think we’ll see that in the mainstream news media? I doubt it.

Also note that I mentioned Worm consults for wine trade groups. This is called being objective, which is something that every peer-reviewed scientific study should aspire to and so few seem to care about these days.

So turn me into a frog if you want. I’ll continue to drink in moderation; walk Churro, the blog’s associate editor, every morning; watch how many eggs and how much red meat I eat; avoid fried foods; and fill out my diet with grains, beans, and vegetables. Which seems like a damned healthy lifestyle, yes?

More about wine and health:
• Once more, how not to report a wine and health story
• One more reason to be wary of alcohol health studies
• Health alert! Does the CDC know how dangerous Starbucks’ pumpkin spice latte is?

Ask the WC 32: Wine prices, wine and health, Ukraine

men drinking wine
“Only $4800 for wine for a year? We spend that much on a couple of cases.”

This edition of Ask the WC: How much trouble does the WC have finding cheap wine to review? Plus, the latest wine and health update and Ukraine wine.

Because the customers always have questions, and the Wine Curmudgeon has answers in this irregular feature. You can Ask the Wine Curmudgeon a wine-related question by clicking here.

Greetings, Cheap Wine Guru:
I saw the post about how you bought 11 bottles of wine for about $11 each. How is that possible, given inflation and premiumization and all the rest?
$10 wine

Dear $10:
The short answer is that I spend a lot of time looking for wine to review that meets the blog’s criteria. The long answer is that I shop at close to a dozen retailers, including national supermarket chains, and it takes up a fair amount of my working week. Ironically, given the way the wine business works, I review very few samples — most are either too expensive, too poorly made, or both. In 2021, I spent $4,800 looking for wine for the blog.
•

Dear Wine Curmudgeon:
Are you going to write a definitive wine and health post? There is so much confusion out there about whether wine will kill someone.
Healthy wine drinker

Dear Healthy:
Drink wine in moderation. That pretty much covers it. The rest — allowing for my lack of medical credentials — is smoke, mostly from neo-Prohibitionists who want everyone to quit drinking everything because too much alcohol is dangerous. Which, of course, is absolutely true. But hot dogs may be even more deadly (nitrites!), and I haven’t seen any of the researchers who are doing junk like this conducting similar pseudo-studies about hot dogs.
•

Hi, WC:
You haven’t written anything about Ukraine and what’s going on there. How come?
Surprised

Dear Surprised:
I started a Ukraine post a couple of times — there is wine in the country, believe it or not — but could never quite figure out what to say. I’ve mostly stayed away from politics on the blog and there really wasn’t a way to write about Ukraine without injecting politics into it. But know that my family left that part of Eastern Europe more than 100 years ago, and the reasons then are just as applicable now.

Photo: MART PRODUCTION from Pexels

More Ask the WC:
• Ask the WC 31: Pinot noir, minimum pricing, wine apocalypse
• Ask the WC 30: BYOB, wine for friends, California fires
• Ask the WC 29: Birthday gifts, larger bottles, and on-line

Winebits 731: The “new year is a lot like the old year” edition

wine and health
“Math? We don’t need no stinkin’ math!”

This week’s wine news: The French are furious over the alleged wine and cancer link, plus new EU rules for grape growing and plant-based wine bottles

• Who can blame them? The French wine business, which has a better sense of itself than we do in the U.S., has lashed out at the infamous wine and cancer study. The head of a French wine trade group called the study the same thing as declaring war on the wine business. The study, of course, is the infamous Lancet effort, which was later repudiated by another peer-reviewed report that called into question its defective math. Said the trade president: “Cancer is a disease caused by multiple factors. These are simplistic analyses… ,” adding that the same logic would prevent breathing, since the air is polluted.

• Different grapes? The European Union, which regulates grape growing for its member states, will allow countries to plant vines that will be better able to adapt to climate change. This is huge news, since it says it’s OK to plant something other than vitis vinifera, the traditional genus and species that includes chardonnay, merlot, and the like. Why is this such big news? It means that in regions like Bordeaux and Tuscany, where law – as well as centuries of tradition – only allow certain grapes to be grown, it’s now possible to plant new grapes.

• Goodbye glass? A new plant-based beverage bottle may bring the drinks industry one step closer to getting rid of glass. That’s the conclusion of the GlobalData consultancy, which says Suntory’s soft drink bottle for products sold in Japan and Europe “represents a step forward for the beverages industry towards the holy grail of biodegradable packaging,” Glass wine bottles, of course, have been under target for almost a year as one more cause of climate change. The Suntory bottles are made with what the company calls “bioplastic,” made from non-food biomass and non-food-grade feedstock. In other words, lots of garbage.

Winebits 728: Wine snobs, wine and health, French wine

wine snobs
“Of course, I don’t know anything about wine. But why should that stop me from faking it?”

This week’s wine news: Wine drinkers are notorious snobs, plus we’re drinking less (honest) and why there will always be a French wine industry

• Bring on the snobs! About one-half of Britons think discussing wine while you’re drinking it is pretentious, and about one-quarter say they have pretended to know more about wine than they do. And we wonder why wine has the reputation that it does? The survey, given that it was done by a company that makes celebrity wine, may not be the most reliable. Still, the results reinforce what non-wine drinkers think about those of us who drink wine. And what does it say about wine drinkers that the survey noted that one-quarter of respondents said screwcaps are still used to judge the quality of a wine?

• Less wine drinking? Almost 40 percent of regular wine drinkers are actively moderating their consumption, particularly younger consumers, according to a study from the Wine Intelligence consultancy. This should only be staggering news (yes, bad pun fully intended) to the neo-Prohibitionists, who have insisted for some two years that we’re all passed out on the sofa each night after dinner – if we bother to eat dinner at all. The report noted that moderation could be “drinking less alcohol at certain occasions, or reducing the strength, or choosing not to drink at all at some occasions.” In the U.S., this included drinking lower alcohol wines and participating in things like Dry January.

• Only in France: The Wine Curmudgeon did a Zoom tasting last week featuring wineries in Bordeaux that make dessert-style wines. The tasting, given how rarely I get to sample these kinds of wines anymore because of higher prices and limited availability, was especially worthwhile. But the other thing that stuck out: The description of Chateau du Cros, one of the wineries. Only in France would someone describe their family as newcomers to the wine business, since they’ve only owned the winery since the World War I. Which is not just more than 100 years ago, but coincides with the beginning of Prohibition in the U.S.

studio microphone

Winecast 64: Paul Tincknell and wine’s failure to address the neo-Prohibitionists

Paul Tincknell
Paul Tincknell: We need to talk about wine and health honestly — the good and the bad.

Wine marketing guru Paul Tincknell returns for another podcast, in which we rant about wine, health, and the wine business’ failure to deal to with all those people who say wine with dinner is binge drinking.

Paul Tincknell, a partner in the Napa marketing consultancy of Tincknell & Tincknell and the blog’s official wine marketing expert, wants the wine business to honestly talk about wine’s health problems — and its benefits. Otherwise, he says, we’re stuck with campaigns that claim anyone who drinks wine will get breast cancer.

His point: Drinking is not a black and white health issue, even though the temperance movement paints it that way. And if the wine business doesn’t call the neo-Prohibitionists on their false claims, no one will.

Included in our discussion:

• Why no one in the anti-drinking movement is going after Starbucks and its 370 calorie, fat and cholesterol bomb better known as the Caffe Mocha.

• The infamous back label drinking warning, and how it does almost no good.

• That wine needs to promote moderate and responsible drinking, which is much different from the binge drinking that wine with dinners has called.

• Wine ingredient and nutritional labels in Europe, why wine in the U.S. needs to adapt the same thing.

Click here to download or stream the podcast, which is about 18 minutes long and takes up 12 megabytes. Quality is excellent. And yes, I know I didn’t properly introduce Paul, since I was so eager to denounce Starbucks. And his calm rationality throughout is a fine counterpoint to my ranting.

Shocking news: Wine with dinner won’t kill you

wine and health
“Of course we’re smiling. We’re not going to die after drinking wine with this dinner.”

New British study says infamous 2018 research that said we’re all going to die was flawed

One of the blog’s tenets when it comes to wine and health studies is to check the methodology. If the study seems flawed in some way – and way too many studies about wine and health from reputable peer-reviewed journals do – then something fishy is going on.

Hence, the infamous 2018 study in Britain’s Lancet, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, and which claimed that any amount of drinking was dangerous. This week, the fish really started smelling.

The Times newspaper of London reported on Wednesday that a soon-to-be published paper in “The International Journal of Epidemiology” found that the Lancet research was “flawed.”

Said one of the new study’s authors: “One cannot now say any amount of alcohol is harmful in the same way as one can say any amount of smoking is harmful.”

The authors note that the “risk of developing a range of illnesses increases with any amount you drink on a regular basis.” The idea, they say, is not to encourage drinking, but to understand that “a little alcohol is acceptable but a lot is harmful.”

Which, of course, is not a surprise to any of us who were paying attention. What I found most interesting was the mathematical analysis used to refute the Lancet study – in other words, checking the methodology. The math showed that the results found in the Lancet research were not consistent with what should have happened.

Which raises the question of how the Lancet research made it past the peer review process. Perhaps the next study can look at that.

Photo: “Chalet N Wine Cellar Dinner” by jurvetson is licensed under CC BY 2.0