 When you think of alcohol, what name comes to your mind first? What’s your first association when you visualise a ‘drink’? Chances are Whisky, Vodka, Gin, and Rum etc- all the beverages falling in the liquor category; that is alcohol. You associate it with getting a ‘current’ in your system, and getting intoxicated. Of course beer is also an alcoholic product, generally termed as soft alcohol-since the alcohol level is low at 4-6.5%.
Wine is not alcohol in that sense of the word. It is a natural product resulting primarily from a natural process that converts the sugar in the grape juice into wine and then vinegar through fermentation. Yeast is required to convert the sugar in the juice to make the transient product which is what we call wine, and it exists naturally on the skin of the grape. Therefore, wine in essence is a natural product that has some alcohol in it due to fermentation.
In real life, the process is more complicated to make wine drinkable, enjoyable and more complex but the fundamentals remain the same. The natural alcohol levels built up vary from around 5% to 14%. So one cannot deny that wine has some (alcohol)-even though natural... provided by nature. Due to the global warming or the areas where the climate is hot and arid, the natural sugar levels get higher and the alcohol level goes up to 15 or 15.5%. There are a few varieties like Primitivo where natural levels of alcohol can go up to as high as 17-18%. In one case, I tasted wine in a winery, that had 18% alcohol and the producer proudly claimed to have reached the level of even 19% one year without any fortification and had priced it high as it was a unique product.
This is in sharp contrast to liquors where the alcohol levels are 40% or more. Now, that’s why one would call the liquor a real alcohol! Wine is not alcohol and the liquor is not made from the natural process of fermentation that would occur by laws of nature. Thus, I exclude fortified wines that claim to be wine and refer only to wines made by the process of fermentation with natural yeast or cultured yeast.
Natural or not, it has been scientifically proven that alcohol creates havoc in the body-unless it is some (small quantity of) alcohol. Wine has only some (alcohol). If the level of intake is reasonable, meaning that if one drinks wine in moderation, it has several proven benefits. If the intake is more than reasonable level (roughly 2 glasses), alcohol is positively harmful.
If you drink wine in moderation, you don’t need to worry. Wine is not alcohol (liquor), it has some (alcohol).
Subhash Arora |