RITUALS OF WINE: Fascination

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Good News! Live to 100 on Red Wine and Chocolate!

Dieters around the world rejoice! The latest fad promises weight loss and long life on a diet of... wait for it... red wine and chocolate!

Cardiovascular expert, Roger Corder, professor of experimental therapeutics at the William Harvey Research Institute in London, is the author of the diet book “The Wine Diet”. The basis of the book is at least two glasses of red wine every day.

People have been saying for a long time that wine is good for you. Paracelsus, the 16th century Swiss doctor wrote, “Wine is a food, a medicine and a poison – it’s just a question of dose.”
 

Corder started his research in the late nineties when he went to Sardinia where the local mountain people are renowned for their longevity. Their diet was not what he expected. It was not a low fat diet, but one which involved very few vegetables and a lot of meat and cheese. Not the most promising start for an enquiry into longevity! Corder, however, noticed that these people regularly drank red wine. So he tested the local drop and found that it contained high levels of procyanidins. These chemicals are known to protect humans against heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some forms of cancer.

In 2002, Corder’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. After chemo therapy and surgery, she changed her diet to include much higher levels of fruit and vegetables. Corder noticed how this diet change seemed to help his wife and began to study diet even more intensely.

Corder says that the Western diet is low in essential nutrients such as folic acid and selenium. Further, most diet books advocated people following a low fat diet, resulting in a drop in the level of bad cholesterol, but also a drop in the level of good cholesterol. The mountain people of Sardinia, however, had a diet high in polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, largely due to high intakes of olive oil.

Based on these observations, Corder said he realised that a lot of diets that avoided fats were wrong. Further, those diets that avoided alcohol altogether did so because of the kilojoule content of alcoholic drinks, without any reference to beneficial properties alcohol might have. Since red wine is high in potassium, it was also useful in bringing blood pressure down.

According to The Australian Wish magazine, Corder tested 400 different wines, 30 of them Australian, to find out which wines contained the most procyanidins. He found that high tannin wines made using traditional techniques, rather than mass-produced wine came out on top. Further, the varieties that gave the best results included malbec and cabernet sauvignon. “The worst performers were the big name mass-produced wines,” says Wish magazine.
 

Corder has amassed a lot of evidence on the potential benefits from red wine.  He also makes similar claims about dark chocolate!  The key seems to be that red wine inhibits a molecule connected with coronary heart disease called endothelin-1.  The procyanidins found in red wine are the key health components of wine and they improve the function of the linings of the blood vessels.  They also protect against heart disease, strokes, diabetes, dementia and, it is thought, some cancers.

The idea of putting all the findings in a book came from Adrian Webster, a publisher and member of the Geoffrey Roberts Committee, a trust that funds food and drink related research. This is the Committee that paid for the research in Sardinia.

The idea that wine and health are somehow interrelated is not new. In 1979, Dr Selwyn St Leger, writing in the British medical magazine, The Lancet, compared figures for heart disease in men aged 55 to 64 in Europe, North America and Australasia.

He found the highest number of deaths were in traditional beer and spirit-drinking countries, while France had the lowest number of deaths and the highest wine consumption.

At the same time, French epidemiologists observed that the French had relatively low rates of coronary heart disease, despite high consumption of saturated fat. This became known as "the French paradox".

The idea that regular wine-drinking could account for the French paradox was put forward by Dr Serge Renaud in 1991, and published the following year in The Lancet. He also put forward the idea that alcohol's ability to inhibit blood-clotting mechanisms underlies this protective effect.
 

Added to this, a Danish study conducted on more than 24,000 people found that one to three glasses of beer or wine a day reduced coronary heart disease, but only wine drinkers benefited from an overall reduction in deaths from all causes. This is what Professor Corder himself said in a recent article in the Telegraph in England:

“Wine drinkers are generally healthier and often live longer. This is not wishful thinking. I have spent many years researching the health-giving benefits of wine and have found that wine drinkers are less likely to suffer from heart disease, diabetes and dementia in old age.

Is this because of the wine, their diet or their lifestyle? It is probably a mixture – and in the Wine Diet, I’ll be showing how you can integrate all three to get the greatest long-term benefits for your health.

For many people, living life at their ideal healthy weight is a constant struggle. Yet conventional weight-loss diets are frequently lacking in essential nutrients and put people at risk of becoming ill. Many overweight people are suffering from a type of malnutrition – living on processed, calorie-rich food that is deficient in minerals and vitamins – and crash diets usually make this worse.

The Wine Diet is different. It is not about calorie counting; it provides a fresh outlook on how to stay healthy. Some of the world’s longest-living people – from Sardinia, Crete and rural south-west France – lack basic health services, yet they live to a ripe old age because they take care of themselves in a fundamental way. They eat fresh or unprocessed foods – and drink wine every day.

The Wine Diet will provide you with nutritional advice to improve your health and tell you how to get the best from regular wine consumption. If followed carefully, you should lose weight in the process and you will also get the greatest long-term benefits of health and longevity.

Daily consumption of wine can be part of a healthy diet. Unlike other diets, the Wine Diet doesn’t tell you to cut out alcohol in order to save a few hundred calories a day. In fact, today I’ll be looking at exactly how red wine can boost your health and teaching you how to pick the best wines.
Numerous scientific studies have shown that red wine helps protect the long-term wellbeing of our hearts by preventing the build-up of fatty deposits in the arteries (atherosclerosis). But some investigations have found that not all red wines have this protective effect.

This fact made me wonder what it is about red wines that makes some of them beneficial. If it was a particular substance in red wine that is protective, then some wines might contain more of it than others. Knowing the active component might eventually make it possible to produce red wines optimised for these properties, or even to produce non-alcoholic alternatives containing them.

So what are the substances in red wine that have this beneficial effect? The answer is polyphenols – the chemical compounds found in the grape skin and seeds that are the main contributors to the colour and taste of red wine.
The most common polyphenols in wine are flavonoids, of which the most significant are known as procyanidins. These are what cause that mouth-puckering astringency in young red wines. Polyphenols are effective anti-oxidants, which disarm the damaging chemicals formed when fat is metabolised, and protect the lining of blood vessels from LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol), which is a key trigger for heart disease.

But for me, the most important breakthrough in our understanding of how these polyphenols protect against heart disease came when studies showed that red wine and grape extracts caused blood vessels to dilate, so helping to reduce blood pressure and protect against hardening of the arteries.

If you are a red-wine drinker and also eat two or three portions of fruit a day, it is likely that you are already consuming 1-2g of protective polyphenols a day. The proportion of these that are procyanidins may vary considerably, but the ideal daily target to aim for would be 300-500mg of procyanidins (I’ll be telling you which foods contain procyanidins tomorrow.)

A word of warning. Traditionally made red wine often has noticeable tannins (a type of procyanidin) and is best enjoyed with food.

However, demand for red wines that are suitable to drink at any time and are less astringent means that many wines now contain fewer procyanidins and so have reduced health benefits.

That said, there are plenty of wines that fall somewhere between the two extremes.

So how do we recognise which wines are richest in procyanidins? The factors affecting the amount can be broadly divided into three areas: the vineyard environment, the grape and the winemaker.

In the vineyard, key factors that determine a high level of polyphenols include well-established vines, long, slow ripening, high altitudes and low yields. Established vines are better because they generally do not need much water as their roots reach deep into the soil; irrigation may increase the amount of wine you can make, but it also dilutes it.

Slow ripening boosts the levels of all polyphenols and two key enzymes involved in polyphenol synthesis are increased by ultraviolet (UV) light. So grapes grown at higher altitudes, where there is more UV exposure, could potentially contain higher levels of procyanidins.

Exposure to direct sunlight would have a similar effect. Low-yielding vines generally give the best-quality wines. I have also noticed that wines made from old vines often have a higher procyanidin level than wines made from younger vines from the same winery.

I don’t know whether this reflects a genuine difference in the quality of the fruit coming from older vines, or whether it is because older vines are frequently used to make a winery’s top wine, so more care may be taken at every stage.
Grape variety can also make a big difference – the smaller the grape and the greater the number of seeds per berry, the higher the potential number of procyanidins. In my experience, the grape yielding the most procyanidin-rich wines is the Tannat, one of the traditional varieties of south-west France. Cabernet Sauvignon also has small berries and a high ratio of pip to pulp.

When I compared Cabernet Sauvignon with Malbec wines grown in similar conditions in Argentina, the Cabernets tended to have more procyanidins. Among others, I was impressed by Nebbiolo, one of the classic grapes of north-west Italy, Sangiovese – the grape of Chianti and a number of other Tuscan wines – and Aglianico, an ancient grape variety grown in southern Italy.

The most important aspect of the winemaking process for ensuring high procyanidins is the contact time between the liquid and the grape seeds and skins; less than seven days will mean a relatively low level of procyanidins, while wines with a contact time of three weeks or more have the highest.
Good wine merchants know which wines are made this way – so ask! Winemakers may also filter their product to make the wine clear and stable and to reduce harsh tannins. This may mean the amount of procyanidins in a wine are substantially reduced.

Whenever possible, choose wines that have been allowed to settle naturally; these may eventually develop a small but harmless deposit in the bottle.

Deciding how long to keep a wine before you drink it can also influence the amount of procyanidins. Long ageing is probably not in your best interests from a health point of view – neither will it do much for the taste of inexpensive, everyday wines.
Communities known for their longevity or exceptional good health traditionally drink their local wines young – usually no more than three years after the vintage – often drawing them straight from the barrel.

The decrease is a gradual process; if a wine has a high level of procyanidins when it is first made, it will still have good levels at five years old. But differences are likely to be greater after 10 years.

When I first started wine research, I hoped I might be able to demonstrate that inexpensive wines were just as beneficial to health as higher-priced ones. Once I realised that it was the traditional long fermentation and maceration of grape seeds and skins in the juice that made the most procyanidin-rich wines, I saw that I might be promoting a style of winemaking I have seen described on French wine labels as vinifié à l’ancienne sans compromis – winemaking the old-fashioned way.

However, as I taste and analyse more wines, I realise the situation is not simply old versus new. Many winemakers combine long fermentation and maceration with modern techniques to improve overall quality.

Their wines retain decent amounts of procyanidins. I am sure such wines will become increasingly popular as consumers recognise how well they go with food. And although wines are not yet analysed routinely for their procyanidin content, there is a fairly simple test to measure the total content of polyphenols.

Winemakers are increasingly quoting IPT (from the French Indice des Polyphénols Totaux) in their technical data, which can often be found on the internet and in wine magazines.
In general, the higher the IPT, the greater the amount of procyanidins in a wine. I have created a rating on a scale of * to *****, where most red wines achieve at least a * rating. A 125ml (4 fl oz) glass of super-rich ***** wine typically contains at least 120mg procyanidins, and often more; a glass of procyanidin-rich *** wine will typically provide 60–90mg of procyanidins; an average wine may contain 30–45mg of procyanidins.

So one important advantage of choosing wines with a high procyanidin level is that less needs to be consumed to achieve the optimal health benefit. The best results I’ve had in my laboratory have been from Madiran wines.
These have some of the highest procyanidin levels I’ve encountered, as a result of the local grape variety, Tannat, and the traditional long fermentation and maceration. In contrast, mass-produced, branded wines sold in many wine bars and pubs generally have disappointingly low levels of procyanidins.

They are also often deceptively high in alcohol. I believe that the types of wine that are best for health are those designed to be sipped as an accompaniment to food, not those made for casual quaffing.

With many thousands of wines being made around the world each year, and with so many variables, a dedicated laboratory would be needed in order to analyse wines systematically.

I can’t give you enough examples to cover what you might want to drink every day, but in the Wine Diet I have analysed many of the red wines I have enjoyed drinking and this should give you a good idea of the types of wines that are likely to be most beneficial.

I see no reason why in the future it should not be a legal requirement to include a statement of the procyanidin content; I predict that sooner or later we will be told exactly what health benefits we can expect from a glass of wine.”

The Wine Diet by Roger Corder (Little, Brown) is available for £9.99 plus 99p p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112.