If a vinter were to tell you, in one of his advertisements, that you should drink wine because it is the best of all tranquilizers, a product of nature that gently relaxes you without damaging your system, you would be immediately handed over to the United States government. States, which has the power to revoke your license and put you out of business. There is a certain federal regulation, ambiguous in its language but backed up by some unequivocal bureaucratic flaws, that effectively prevents you from publicizing this important truth.
It’s about time someone came up with the best of all reasons (there are plenty of others!) why tension-ridden America should include wine in its daily diet. Before someone asks “Aren’t beer, whiskey and gin the same as wine?” and “Are you advocating that we all become alcoholics?” We are going to address both questions.
Wine is essentially a natural product; malts and distilled beverages are manufactured. The grape is the only fruit that is preserved naturally, without anything being added or taken away. This is because it contains fermentable sugars and because the “flower”-like powder on its skin contains natural yeasts that can ferment those sugars into alcohol. If we crush a handful of grapes and leave the juice in a glass, it will turn into wine.
There is much more to wine than mere alcohol. Wines, depending on their type, have been medically proven to contain not only valuable fruit sugars in the human diet, but are also the only common alcoholic beverages to contain significant amounts of B vitamins, in addition to the thirteen mineral elements recognized as essential for sustaining animal and human life. They also have the ability to improve appetite and promote digestion. In fact, a glass of Malbec a day can improve your health.
It is its non-alcoholic components, which are not found in spirits, that make wines behave differently in the human body. Somehow, in ways not yet fully understood by medical researchers, the organic acids, esters, and nitrogen-containing compounds in wines reduce the rate at which the alcohol in wines enters the bloodstream. The slow rate of absorption is important. Your blood alcohol level, when you drink wine, reaches a plateau instead of a peak; Alcohol circulates at low levels throughout your body, where it numbs and helps relax your nervous nerve centers. you feel a nice glow. The pleasant sensation of wine lasts longer than that of other drinks. Other people’s alcohol enters your blood more quickly; its effects are more sudden and more pronounced.
In other words, don’t drink wine to “get a kick,” because if you want a kick, you’ll get it quicker and stronger with vodka. The alcoholic effect of wine is more gradual. If you haven’t yet discovered for yourself the relaxing quality of a fine glass of Petite Sirah [http://www.wineaccess.com/wine/grape/Petite%20Sirah]ask some of your friends if wine doesn’t put them to sleep more easily than a stronger drink.
Some leading medical authorities have said that wine could well supplant 90% of the drugs used to induce sleep. There is also reason to wonder if Americans would be taking more than 65,000,000 aspirin tablets every twenty-four hours to reduce pain if more people used wine.
