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

Meanwhile, the booze news from Denmark is no better for beer bingers. A recent Danish study found that beer drinking was “significantly associated with a higher prevalence of risk drinking, smoking, and illicit drug use.” Wine drinking, on the other hand, was “significantly associated with higher IQ, higher parental educational level and higher socioeconomic status.” The study also found wine drinkers to be less neurotic, less anxious, less depressed, and to suffer from fewer psychotic thoughts and delusions. The authors concluded that wine drinking was indicative of “optimal social, cognitive, and personality development.”

Beyond this, Serge Renaud’s study of French men revealed that wine drinkers have a significantly lower all-cause death rate than beer drinkers or abstainers. Renaud speculates that this could be because wine drinking is associated with a reduced risk of cancer—a benefit that beer drinking and teetotaling do not offer.

Of course, wine drinking makes you smarter and more emotionally stable in much the same way that tall trees on the Olympic Peninsula cause rain or living in a big coastal city causes you to vote for Kerry.

Still, check out the local tavern on any given evening. It is likely no health club. The smoke, the empty beer calories, the greasy fried pub grub—everything conspiring against your health, paving the way for a heart attack, the onset of type-two diabetes, for a whole host of weight, smoke and booze-related health problems to kick in and drag a person (six feet) under.

Wine, of course, is a different dog entirely. For one thing, you don’t drink it glass after glass standing at a bar distracted by sports on the TV, you sip it with dinner. And that is, at least in part, why wine is more healthy than other alcoholic drinks: food slows the absorption of alcohol into the bloodstream, and the liver and brain get a gradual dose rather than a Rock ’em, Sock ’em pounding.

Of course, drinking for health is one thing; for happiness, quite another. And for most, the best part of drinking wine has nothing to do with improving health— health benefits are just an incredibly serendipitous side effect. For them, that bit of wine shared at dinner with friends represents the best part of the day.

Of the many alcoholic drinks available, only wine has such a specific connection to the table, suggested succinctly by the very term “table wine.” It is the only form of alcohol that is so carefully and consistently matched according to what will be eaten. Wine is inseparable from food, both of which work in symbiosis, each enhancing the enjoyment of the other. Is it coincidence that countries most associated with wine—France and Italy—are noted for their cuisine, while beer countries like England, Ireland, and Germany are, uhm, not?

It is at the table when you 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.