IN VINO VERITAS

Frequently, we hear about wine, or wine’s components’ healthy properties, many times without the much needed explanations concerning the scientific rigor of such statement,even with some enthusiasm to claim the good habit of drinking moderately the blood of our land, often resulting in some incongruous speech with no true nutritional relevancy.

Referring ourselves to studies that surpass the minimum demandable significance, we can remind all the already published ones about tannins with different opinions and controversy about white or black wine, the later studies about beneficial properties to fight against lung, cardiovascular illness, even alarm causing diseases such as Alzheimer and cancer, many of them being based in resveratrol, a poliphenol present in practically every part of the vine of which its antioxidant properties, and thus cell life extending, are demonstrated.

But these studies aren’t the target of this article, rather than something that researches carried out on 4400 people by Duke College (North Carolina) in 2002, and published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, pointed out.

Not the wine itself, but the habits and lifestyle of its consumers seem to explain their better health.

This year’s January 23 Jano On-line makes reference to another research published at the British Medical Journal, carried out in Denmark (unfortunately famous right now because of fanaticism), where it can be concluded that wine drinkers tend to take a more healthy diet than the beer drinkers, and, careful! Imagine which drink makes you think more about a Danish, we can discard the chauvinism worries later.

It seems that it’s being confirmed with some scientific value, it is not necessary to split wine in a thousand particles to find it’s hidden goodness, it’s the very essence of choosing it as a pleasure partner, therefore doing so in it’s exact measurement, the one that makes the person get far from fanaticisms, either ideological or nutritional.

Almost everything has been thought out, and the classics did great part of the job, on the year 630 B.C. Greek poet Alceo, of whom some fragments of his works have been preserved, stated: “Dear son, wine is truth”, more recently, just on the first century on our calendar, Plinio the Old, a notable Roman, that, by the way, gives his name to the fictional literary character by Garcia Pavon, points out in his opera magna “Natural History”: “According to people, truth has been attributed to wine”.

Let’s do as much as possible then so that our land, La Mancha, can be the spring of health and our wines, together with the ones of other parts of Spain, get with no complex to all the corners of our planet and make man be hearty, tolerant and joyful.

We have jumped from history to the present day, with substance enough to claim a land with no boundaries, the Land of Wine.

Luís Menchén - Jan 2006