Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508260005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEOFF SEAMANS ASSOCIATE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Indeed, the entries for "wine" in the index of my copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations outnumber those for "virtues."
(OK, OK, so I fudge. The Bartlett's entries for "wine" do not outnumber those for "virtue" singular. Still, the index has a column and a half's worth of entries referring to wine.)
Aside from its other pleasures - flavor, social lubrication, enhancement of the taste of accompanying food - wine in moderate amounts, it turns out, might actually be good for you. Not just unharmful, but actually beneficial to your health.
If the hypothesis holds up, it will be an exception to the otherwise unremitting grimness of the reports that have emanated from the field of nutritional research during my nearly half-century on this planet. Those findings can be roughly summarized:
If it tastes good, it's bad for you.
The delicious, bone-strengthening whole milk given out free when I was in elementary school? The route, they now say, to cardiovascular disease. Drink only low-fat milk or, even better (or worse), that chalky water they call skim milk.
Those bacon-and-egg breakfasts that in my youth were advised as a wholesome way to start the day? Another path to heart trouble. And if you must insist on eating eggs, cook 'em till they're hard as rocks lest you get zapped by salmonella.
It is within my lifetime that the consumption of abundant quantities of red meat was encouraged as the protein-laden base of a square meal. The word today: Keep it lean, in both amount and character - even, say some, give it up entirely in favor of red beans and rice, and assorted other unappetizing substances.
But wine? Well, maybe it's different.
First, the obvious disclaimers. Whether from bourbon or bordeaux, alcohol is still alcohol. Consumption is not advised for pregnant women or people for whom alcohol is addictive, or before driving, climbing trees or operating heavy machinery.
No sober source advocates perpetual inebriation; the references, rather, are to a couple of glasses with dinner. The same beneficial effects seem not to derive from beer or spirits - nor, for that matter, from any but red wine.
Such disclaimers, however, cannot gainsay the "French paradox" - the fact that the wine-drinking, cheese-eating, cream-loving French have relatively low rates of heart disease - that in recent years has inspired scientific attention on red wine and grape skins, whose presence in red wine distinguishes it from white.
A Cornell University study found that resveratrol, an antifungal agent in grape skins, may act to reduce the chances of heart disease. A 1993 California study suggested that coloring chemicals in red wine are also antitoxidants that may, along with the resveratrol, thwart the effects of LDL, or "bad" cholesterol. A University of Wisconsin study noted evidence of the ability of red wine, perhaps because of the presence of a chemical called quercetin, to suppress the blood clotting that causes heart attacks and strokes.
"Who does not love wine, women and song/Remains a fool his whole life long," goes an English translation of a German couplet sometimes attributed to Martin Luther but said by Bartlett's to have been penned by Johann Heinrich Voss (whoever he was) a couple of hundred years later.
Luther or no - and I've always pictured him as a beer drinker anyway - wine and Christianity ... well, if they're not exactly inseparable companions, then at least they're not unacquainted with each other.
At the Last Supper, Jesus broke the bread and drank the wine; at the wedding at Cana, he changed the water into wine.
Some years later, Paul admonished Timothy: "No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments."
From a whole 'nuther culture comes this: "One should write not unskillfully in the running hand, be able to sing in a pleasing voice and keep good time to music; and, lastly, a man should not refuse a little wine when it is pressed upon him."
That's by Yoshida Kenko (whoever he was), writing in 14th-century Japan. Kenko also wrote: "However gifted and accomplished a young man may be, if he has no fondness for women, one has a feeling of something lacking, as of a precious wine cup without a bottom."
Hmm, a wine cup without a bottom. Is that one of those concepts of the mysterious Orient, like the sound of one hand clapping, which eludes us linear thinkers of the Occident? Maybe. The Kenko quotes strike me, though, as just an earlier and wordier version of Voss's "wine, women and song" line, with the bit about a skillful writing hand added for good measure.
In both East and West, of course, aging gentlemen sometimes find it all a tad much, and are forced to cut back on the singing.
But not so much, perhaps, on the wine. As the 20th century slouches toward a close, we may be finding that the sages of the ages were reading from the proper pages; that Paul's advice to Timothy was right on the medical mark.
by CNB