Wine and Health: Looking Beyond the Headlines

4 days ago

6 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

For generations, wine has been surrounded by stories about health.

We have heard about the “French paradox”, the Mediterranean diet, the polyphenols in red wine and the idea that a glass with dinner might somehow be good for the heart.

Then, more recently, the headlines seemed to change completely. Suddenly we were being told that no amount of alcohol could be considered completely risk-free.

So which story should we believe?

We became curious about this ourselves. Not because we wanted to prove that wine was healthy, but because wine is now such a big part of our lives here in Piemonte. We grow grapes. We live among vineyards. We share bottles around long family tables. And we wanted to understand what the research actually says.

What we discovered was perhaps more interesting than either headline.

Wine doesn't need to be good for our health to have value.

Its place in our lives can be cultural, agricultural, sensory and social. And perhaps somewhere along the way, we have spent too much time asking whether the wine itself is healthy and not enough time looking at everything happening around the glass.

So, is a glass of red wine good for your heart?

The short answer is: we can't say that it is.

There is a reason the idea became so widespread.

Over many years, observational studies noticed that people who drank small or moderate amounts of alcohol sometimes experienced lower rates of cardiovascular disease than people classified as nondrinkers.

A major review published by the US National Academies in 2025, for example, found that moderate alcohol consumption was associated with lower cardiovascular and overall mortality. But the same review found an association with increased breast-cancer risk and highlighted significant limitations in the research.

And that little word—associated—matters.

An association tells us that two things have been observed together. It doesn't prove that one caused the other.

People who drink a glass of wine with dinner may also eat differently, exercise more, have different incomes, spend more time socially with other people or simply have different lifestyles from those being compared with them.

Even the group described as “nondrinkers” can complicate the research. It can include lifelong abstainers alongside people who stopped drinking because of illness, medication or previous problems with alcohol.

When researchers try to account for these differences, the apparent health advantage of light or moderate drinking becomes much less certain.

A 2024 review of 107 long-term studies involving almost 4.8 million people found that when researchers concentrated on the studies that had done the most to reduce these biases, low-volume drinkers did not have a clear mortality advantage over abstainers.

That doesn't mean every earlier study was wrong.

It means we simply don't have good enough evidence to say: drink wine because it is good for your heart.

And health organisations don't recommend that people who don't drink should start drinking wine for health reasons.

But what about all those wonderful things in red wine?

This was another part of the story we wanted to understand.

Red wine contains plant compounds called polyphenols, including resveratrol. They have shown interesting antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties in laboratory research and have contributed enormously to red wine's healthy reputation.

But there is an important distinction between finding an interesting compound in wine and proving that drinking wine improves our health.

The quantities used in laboratory studies can be very different from those found in a glass. And, of course, we cannot consider the polyphenols while ignoring the alcohol that comes with them.

A 2025 review of clinical trials looking at wine and aspects of metabolic health found no consistent effect on glucose, insulin, diastolic blood pressure or body mass index.

And fortunately, if it is polyphenols we are looking for, there are plenty of other places to find them: grapes, berries, olive oil, nuts, tea and cocoa among them.

So perhaps we can simply allow grapes to be fascinating without needing to turn our wine into a supplement.

Here in Piemonte, wine means something different

When we look at wine here, we don't see a health product.

We see a table.

In Piemonte, wine traditionally belongs with food. It is part of the meal rather than the purpose of it.

A bottle might be opened while lunch is being prepared. Someone tastes it. Someone inevitably has an opinion about it. Food starts appearing on the table. Another chair gets pulled up. Stories begin.

And lunch somehow stretches well into the afternoon.

Since moving here, this has become one of the things we love most about life in Piemonte.

Wine is present, but it isn't necessarily the centre of everything.

The people are.

Having wine with food can also change the way it is consumed. Food slows the absorption of alcohol, and sitting around a table tends to create a very different rhythm from drinking quickly or drinking on an empty stomach.

Of course, a meal doesn't magically remove the alcohol. The ethanol is still there.

What changes is the context: the pace, the amount, the food and the experience surrounding it.

And context is something researchers have found remarkably difficult to separate from the wine itself.

The Mediterranean diet was never just a shopping list

We often talk about the Mediterranean diet as though it is simply a collection of ingredients.

Vegetables. Pulses. Grains. Olive oil. Fish. Perhaps some wine.

But that misses something important.

UNESCO recognises the Mediterranean diet as cultural heritage—not simply because of what people eat, but because of the traditions surrounding cultivation, harvesting, preparing food, hospitality and eating together.

Sharing food is part of the culture.

And that feels very familiar to us here.

The landscape matters. The season matters. Where the food came from matters. Who prepared it matters.

And, most of all, the people sitting around the table matter.

Which raises an interesting question.

When studies find associations between a Mediterranean way of life and better health, how do we possibly separate one small glass of wine from the vegetables, olive oil, walking, family meals, friendships, daily routines and sense of community surrounding it?

We can't easily do that.

Perhaps we have been staring so intently at the glass that we have missed the table.

Maybe the table is the healthier part of the story

There is growing research into something many families and cultures have understood for generations: sharing meals with other people matters.

The Oxford-led World Happiness Report 2025 found that people who shared more meals reported greater life satisfaction, more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions, even after researchers considered factors including age, income and living arrangements.

Again, this is an association rather than proof that simply organising more dinner parties will make us healthier or happier.

But it does tell us something worth paying attention to.

Sitting down together creates time.

Time to talk. Time to listen. Time for children to hear the stories they have already heard twenty times. Time for grandparents to tell them again anyway.

Meals create traditions. They connect generations. They give us a reason to stop what we are doing and be with one another.

And wine can be part of that ritual.

A bottle can tell a story about where it came from, the year it was made, the people who grew the grapes or the holiday when you first discovered it.

It can begin a conversation.

It can connect what is on the table to the landscape outside the window.

But we need to be careful about what we attribute to the wine.

The World Health Organization has identified social connection as an important part of health and wellbeing, with loneliness and social isolation having significant consequences for both physical and mental health.

That does not mean alcohol creates those health benefits.

The value is in the connection.

Wine can accompany the moment, but the truly important ingredients are probably the people, the food, the conversation, the hospitality and the time we choose to give one another.

Wine doesn't need to be medicine to matter

Perhaps this is where we have landed after reading all of this research.

We don't need to defend wine by pretending it is a health food.

The current evidence doesn't justify telling people that wine is good for their physical health. Alcohol carries risks, those risks generally increase as consumption increases, and nobody needs to begin drinking wine in pursuit of better health.

But that doesn't make wine meaningless.

For us, wine is agriculture.

It is watching the vineyard change through the seasons. It is the nervous excitement of harvest. It is the story of a particular year captured in a bottle.

It is food and tradition.

It is opening something special when friends arrive.

It is bringing a bottle from Piemonte to somebody's table and being able to tell them about the place where those grapes grew.

And very often, it is simply an excuse to sit down together.

Perhaps that's the part of wine culture worth protecting.

Not the old promise that a glass of red wine will somehow make us healthier, but the much older tradition of making time for one another.

So perhaps the toast doesn't need to be to our health.

Perhaps it can simply be to good food, good company and more time around the table.

And that feels like something worth raising a glass to.