{Wine, It's What's for Dinner, Part II}

Let's talk health benefits. Studies link the moderate, routine consumption of wine with a reduced risk not just of heart attacks, but a holy host of heinous diseases that lay in wait for us down the road: stroke, prostate and lung cancers, dementia, diabetes, osteoporosis, gall bladder disease, and Alzheimer's. A little wine is also shown to reduce stress and tension and encourage the kind of “pleasant feelings” that for so long have sent the puritans among us into fits of apoplexy.

By the same token, saving up all our boozing for the weekend is not doing a body good. Fourteen drinks slammed over the weekend is suicide. Comparatively, that same number of wine drinks consumed gradually during the course of the week at dinner is practically a miracle cure.

Of course, drinking for health is one thing; for happiness, quite another. And for most of us, the best part of drinking wine has nothing to do with improving health -- health benefits are just an incredibly serendipitous side effect. For us, that bit of wine shared at dinner with friends represents the best part of the day. This is when we can enjoy the wine for its own sake, appreciating the way it complements the flavors of food, and vice versa; the way it sparks conversation; and the way that wine, in its gentle seduction, tingles the senses, warms the body and “gladdens the heart.” Surely these are the most beneficent benefits of all.