If You Drink Wine and Want to Be Healthy, Look for These 6 Things.

Ever wonder: What’s really in wine?

Wine has no nutrition label and no ingredients label. How do you know what you’re really drinking?

As we all become increasingly more conscious of what’s in our food, shouldn’t we also question what we drink? We celebrate grass-fed meat, wild caught fish, and organically-grown vegetables, but we blindly accept additives and chemicals in our wine. Why would we allow that sacrifice to our health?

You already choose to eat the cleanest possible foods. It’s time to start doing the same with your wine.

The journey starts with this question:

What’s really in wine?

Turns out, a lot of junk. Like chemicals, additives, metals, animal products, sugars, and more. Many of these are known to be toxic to our health.

The good news is that there is a healthier way.

Wines that meet the following 6 criteria not only taste amazing, they leave you feeling great, are better for your health, support passionate family farmers, and are better for the environment.

Why drink anything else?

Here are the 6 criteria:

1) Organic or Biodynamic Farming

Healthy wine starts with healthy soil. Organic and biodynamic farming cultivate a healthy soil.

Soil is teeming with life. A handful of soil contains more bacteria than there are humans on the planet. These microorganisms and the grape vines have an important symbiotic relationship. Just like humans need bacteria to keep us alive and healthy (you have 10x as many bacteria in you as human cells!), so do plants. Plants can’t directly absorb all the nutrients they need. Bacteria break down nutrients into forms the roots can consume.

Healthy vines require a nutrient-rich and microorganism-filled soil.

Most modern vineyards spray chemicals — pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers — over their plants. These kill the life in the soil.

Even worse, they often end up in your wine.

Many of these chemicals, including Roundup, are known or probable causes of cancer, Parkinson’s, infertility, and more. In sample testing, they have not only shown up in the wines, they have also shown up in the surrounding groundwater.

Just as animals are often given antibiotics to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions they’re put in, so too with grapes. The vines are sprayed with these chemicals to kill everything around them. These are short-sighted practices. They leave the animals and the vines weaker and, ultimately, less nutritious.

Sadly, the amount of pesticides sprayed on vines has grown 26-fold in the last 50 years. Grapes now have among the highest doses of synthetic pesticides of any crop.

Fortunately, organic and biodynamic farmers support the life in their farms, including the life in the soil. They use compost, compost teas, green manure, and cover crops to fertilize rather than synthetic fertilizers, they use mechanical weeding rather than herbicides, and they have grazing chickens and livestock to keep insects in check rather than spray insecticides.

Organic farms produce crops exactly as nature intended. Those are the grapes you want in your wine.

2) Dry-Farming

Dry-farmed vines get their water from natural rainfall. Irrigated vines are dripped water from tubes tied to the plants.

Irrigation is relatively new. It was only introduced in the 1960’s. It spread quickly because it resulted in higher yields (aka, more profits) and sweeter wines.

Drip irrigation encourages roots to stay near the surface where their water is pooling. Their roots usually only grow a few feet deep. Dry-farming, on the other hand, requires the roots to dig deeper to search for water, often up to 30 feet underground. Deeper roots interact with more microorganisms in the soil. They have access to more nutrients. They support healthier vines that eventually produce richer, more complex wines.

Because dry-farming produces lower crop yields, it’s not a common practice in the US. About 95% of land is irrigated. In some regions of Europe, however, it’s actually illegal to irrigate.

When buying wine, seek out dry-farmed vineyards.

3) No Additives

Wine is simple. It’s fermented grapes. That’s it. Grapes that come from a healthy vineyard already have everything they need to become wine.

But the reality for today’s wine is much different.

In their quest to produce wine faster, in larger quantities, with more consistency, and at a lower cost, the wine industry has altered the composition of wine to the point where it’s production looks more like a witches cauldron than the simple process of grape fermentation, and the final product is more a drinkable chemistry experiment than a natural juice.

Additives are used to change flavors, add coloring, increase sweetness, and a whole lot more. The FDA approves 76 different additives for use in winemaking. Here are some of those additives you’re drinking in wine:

• Sugars
• Sulfites
• Grape juice concentrate
• Tartaric acid
• Oak “essence” (actual oak barrels are expensive)
• Colorings like Mega Purple and Ultra Red
• Commercial yeast
• Acetaldehyde
• Albumen (egg white)
• Ammonium phosphate
• Ascorbic acid
• Defoaming agents (polyoxyethylene 40 monostearate, silicon dioxide, dimethylpoly-siloxane, sorbitan monostearate, glyceryl mono-oleate and glyceryl dioleate)
• Gelatin
• Granular cork
• Milk products (pasteurized whole, skim, or half-and-half)
• Oak chips or particles
• Soy flour
• … and a whole lot more!

38 of those 76 additives are only considered GRAS, or Generally Recognized As Safe.

That’s not what you want to drink.

You want to drink wines that start with healthy grapes and happy yeast, and then have nothing added and nothing removed.

4) Low Alcohol

Alcohol is toxic. So are water and oxygen in the wrong dose. Dosage matters.

That said, most of us drink alcohol. It’s part of our culture. Not only is it highly pleasurable, but there are also some real benefits to drinking alcohol in the right dose.

Those include…

• A sense of euphoria. It lifts our spirit and makes us feel good.
• An expansion of our creative expression. It lowers our inhibition, helps clear our mind, and gives our true creative potential the space to flourish.
• An enhancement of the culinary experience. It pairs perfectly with food, allowing the food to express itself while rounding out the flavor.
• A deeper sense of connection. It encourages us to be vulnerable, and this vulnerability creates deeper bonds with the people we love.

Dosage matters, though. If you drink too much, the negatives outweigh the positives. It’s well-documented that large quantities of alcohol adversely affect your health.

This is why it’s better to drink low alcohol wines. Low alcohol wines allow you to enjoy the benefits and taste of wine without feeling like you just got slugged over the head.

5) Sugar-Free

You already know how terrible sugar is for your health.

Sadly, most wines are high in sugar, especially in the US. If you want to be healthy, you need to avoid this hidden sugar.

When wines are allowed to fully ferment, all the naturally-occurring sugars are converted to alcohol. With no residual sugar remaining in the wine and no additives thrown in to sweeten it, a wine is sugar-free.

However, since wine has no nutrition label, you don’t really know how much sugar is in any given wine.

To guarantee your wines are truly sugar-free, you would need to lab test every bottle…

6) Lab Tested

The only thing required to be printed on a wine label is the alcohol percentage and that’s not even required to be accurate. By law, the actual alcohol % in a bottle of wine can be 1-1.5% greater than or less than what’s stated on the bottle.

Just like we all demand transparency in our food, so too should we demand transparency in our wine.

Since we’re the ones putting the wine in our mouth, shouldn’t we know exactly what’s in it? That’s why it’s best to find wines that have been independently lab tested.

Summary

When you find wines made in this natural way, without any manipulation of the land, vines, grapes, or juice, you remove the negative side effects typically associated with drinking wine. That means no hangovers, headaches, rashes, stomach aches, or any of the usual symptoms.

Finding wines that meet all 6 criteria is not easy, and yet wines that don’t meet them aren’t worth finding.

Finding these wines has become my journey. I joined Dry Farm Wines because I believe in this cause. We only curate wines that meet these 6 criteria.

That said, this is not about us. You can find these elsewhere. Search for a natural wine bar near you. You can drink them there.

The point here is to ask you to question what you drink in the same way you question what you eat.

What’s really in wine?

Let that question sit and aerate, like a young glass of wine. As it opens up, you too may find yourself on this magnificent journey.

If you enjoyed this…

1. Please press the “heart” icon below so more people will see it. That’s one way to expand this conversation.
2. Read more about lab testing wines. This goes into more detail about each of the criteria.