10 Amazing Health Benefits of Wine

Not a day seems to go by when we aren’t bombarded with various news articles proclaiming the detrimental effects of drinking wine. Just when you think you’ll never imbibe another drop again, the pendulum swings the other way and a piece of science lauding the health benefits of wine is released, and we consumers are left scratching our collective heads.

Does wine have any health benefits? 

So is wine good for you or not?

If you have ever felt guilty pouring yourself a glass of wine, wondering about the sugar content in wine, or thinking about the calories in a bottle of wine, whether it’s going to have a negative impact on your cardiovascular health, or if that one glass of wine is going to take years off your life, let us stop you right there.

We want to put paid to the slander once and for all: yes wine can be an indulgent product, something we covet at the end of a long day, a means through which we collectively celebrate or commiserate, but bad for your health, it is not.

Wine in moderation (always in moderation) can actually be good for your health. Don’t believe us?

Read on to discover 10 amazing health benefits of wine.

1. Red wine is good for teeth

Forget your dentist’s dire warnings about wine being bad for your teeth – responsible for causing cavities. Spanish scientists have actually found that red wine could protect against cavities and is one of the most effective ways to remove these bad bacteria from teeth.

2. Wine improves your balance

Hear us out here. We all know that when we’ve had a tipple too many our balance is one of the first functions that takes the hit, however in the long term, supping on red wine, more specifically the resveratrol in red wine, could improve our balance in the years to come.

Research on lab mice suggests that resveratrol actually decreases the motor deficiencies that we associate with ageing, balance in particular.

3. Wine helps manage pain in childbirth

According to a book containing Hippocratic Recipes by Laurence Totelin, Hippocrates prescribed wine to women in labour, believing it to help with the pain of childbirth.

Fairly confident that if you were to offer any sort of pain relief to a woman in the throes of labour she would gladly accept it. So why not make that analgesia grape-based?

4. Wine is packed full of antioxidants

Free radicals can be blamed for a lot of ailments, even causing cancer. How do you fight free radicals you ask? By throwing antioxidants at them, that’s how.

And what is packed to the brim with antioxidants? Wine.

According to scientists at the University of Barcelona, wine phenolics have been reported to have health benefits, including protection against cardiovascular diseases and anti-carcinogenic effects.

White wine is best because white wine phenols have a comparable or higher antioxidant capacity than red wine phenols. Which is mildly ironic, because red wine is the one that is typically hailed as being the one with the most health benefits.

5. Wine is good for your heart

If you’re concerned about your cardiovascular health and the effects of wine consumption on the old ticker’s ability to function, you can rest easy.

The tannins in red wine contain procyanidins (phenols by another name), and these phenols have been shown to prevent cardiovascular disease. So if an apple a day keeps the dentist away, a glass of red wine a day should keep the heart surgeon away. Cheers to that.

And if you truly love red wine, find out how long does red wine last once opened.

6. Wine reduces the risk of type-2 diabetes

If you’ve ever wondered how much sugar is in a glass of wine or about the levels of sugar in white wine and whether you’ll develop type-2 diabetes as a result of supping wine regularly, let us allay those fears.

The resveratrol in wine that keeps you on your feet as you are ageing will also help improve your sensibility to insulin. Insulin resistance is the key contributor to developing type-2 diabetes, so if drinking a glass of wine improves your insulin receptiveness, imbibe away we say. Find out more about sugar in wine, sugar content in wine can be confusing. 

7. Wine lets you live longer

Those clever folks at Harvard Medical School found that awesome component in wine, resveratrol, played another superb role alongside its ability to help with balance and reduce the risk of developing type-2 diabetes.

Wine activates a protein in our bodies that helps with ageing. Essentially, resveratrol increases our health so significantly, it actively elongates our lifespan.

8. Wine boosts fertility

You heard it here first. Well, second, it came out of American research, but we’ll report it for them. Apparently a glass of red wine a week can significantly improve a woman’s fertility – that sneaky wonder, resveratrol once again has a helping hand, positively affecting the quantity, health and viability of a woman’s eggs. 

9. Wine doesn’t give you a gut

Have you ever heard of a wine gut? Of course, you haven’t, it doesn’t exist. Amazing health benefit of wine. Have you ever heard of a beer gut? Yup. Do you really need any more reason why you should switch from beer to wine?

10. Wine banishes breakouts

Let’s hear it one more time for the supremely awesome resveratrol. That’s right folks, resveratrol inhibits the growth of acne-causing bacteria. And no, you don’t smear it on your skin, you drink it down and let it work its magic from the inside out.

Finally, it’s worth noting that not all wine is created equal.

Here at Pull The Cork we are aware that consumers are growing ever more conscious about the environment and their health and the environment. And that they also take a large interest in the products they use, where they are coming from, and how they are made. The vast majority of the wines we list, therefore, are natural wines, either produced using organic or biodynamic methods, fermented with indigenous yeast, and made with some minimum interventions from the picking in the vineyard all the way to the bottle. 

We are all about promoting wine that is not just good for the environment but for ourselves. So, take a look at our selection of premium organic wines.  

If you are looking for something more specific, you can easily find a vegan friendly wine or search for low histamine wines 🙂