I appreciate your honest response. I believe you when you say you have sulfite problems.

I wanted to point out that more people claim to have sulfite problems than really do. Wine has alcohol, and people get drunk from it. It is a diuretic, so people get dehydrated. Some people’s livers don’t do too well with it. They might get gassy. They might feel sick from the alcohol metabolizing to sugar. Maybe they have a problem with some of the types of wood involved, etc. To blame it all on an “artificial process” is to over-simplify the problem.

That said, I may have been a bit overzealous in my previous post, and I take back any implication that you’re over-simplifying things. You probably know a lot more about wine than I do!

This over-simplification irks me because in the US we currently have a lot of people decrying “artificial” things as terrible. In reality, absolutely everything we eat had *some* sort of engineering applied to it. The act of starting agrarian societies and then selective harvesting put us down that path :)

A common problem is for people to say they don’t like “chemicals” in their food, or making gross over-simplifications like “if it has more than N syllables, then it’s poison”. This is quite an ignorant stance to take, and quite far from the truth. Yet even some respected health “experts” in the US say things like this regularly.

Maybe you’ve seen some of this, too.

You’re also right that there are a ton of wine-like products that aren’t really wine. I would prefer not to drink a lot of these, too. Unless it’s a decent sangria, wine spritzer, or other such cocktail that is mixed by hand from known decent ingredients. In my opinion, those don’t count :)