It’s surprising how long it took for winemakers to develop a complete grasp of the chemistry involved in the transformation of grapes to wine. Scientists had put astronauts into space before oenologists fully understood what happens during malolactic fermentation. Nowadays there’s plenty of research money, but it’s usually directed at industry (rather than consumer) priorities.
There certainly hasn’t been enough of a focus on consumers’ adverse reactions to wine. This may be because producers believe they can ignore the loss to the market of wine drinkers who have developed intolerances and allergies — though the numbers are higher than they realise, and have been growing. It may also be because there’s a puritanical streak among the medical research community — many of whom are dealing with life and death issues — so a few people doing without the occasional glass of wine is hardly a concern.
It turns out that a significant number of wine enthusiasts suffer from allergies or intolerances associated with their favourite beverage. Mostly they seem to think of the discomfort as inevitable: the price paid for pleasure — a little like the certainty of hay fever as a rite of spring. The conventional scapegoat is sulphur dioxide. It is certainly implicated if the levels are as high as they need to be for bag-in-the-box wines, but otherwise it is unlikely to affect any but the most at-risk asthmatics.
In the end it took a wine specialist — in this case a candidate completing her Master of Wine studies — to look into the area of wine intolerances and to make some discoveries which fly in the face of received wisdom. Sophie Parker-Thomson wrote: “My paper conducted a substantial literature review on wine intolerance and established that the most likely cause of this surprisingly common condition is BAs (biogenic amines). Ingesting these bacterially created chemical compounds in an amount higher than our bodies can naturally detoxify, triggers responses that match the complaints we hear from those who suffer from wine intolerance.
“The symptoms are wide ranging and include, among others, headaches, migraines, rashes, heart palpitations, flushing, stomach upsets, hyper- and hypotension and nasal congestion. What makes BAs more significant in wine is that alcohol inhibits the enzymatic detoxification of them ... There is irony in this finding as there is a widely held misconception that sulphites are the main source of wine intolerance in consumers.”
Research has shown that biogenic amine levels are highest in wines that have had no sulphur added or where the sulphur was added late in the production process. In other words, the addition of a small amount of sulphur dioxide (30ppm) would solve the problem by making the environment inhospitable to the bacteria that produce biogenic amines.
This study is of significance to at least 10% of all wine drinkers. Given the fashion of late or no sulphuring (a feature of the “natural” wine movement) it seems certain that more and more wine drinkers will find themselves suffering adverse reactions without realising that their allergy is not to all wines, just a certain style of wine.
My own experience bears this out. I first encountered the effect of biogenic amines when judging the Tri-Nations in Australia about 15 years ago, usually on the day I tasted the sauvignon class. It became an annual trauma, initially only when judging in the Antipodes. Then it started happening in SA, once when I chaired the Platter 5 star tasting, once when I did the British Airways on-board selection, once at the CWG tasting. For the past 10 years I’ve taken prophylactic medication when judging a large class of wines.
For consumers suffering from these reactions there are a few options worth considering. If it appears to be an allergic reaction (hay fever, nasal congestion and so on) an antihistamine taken before indulging may be all that’s required. If it’s more of the headache or upset stomach response, perhaps test it out with less geeky, more mainstream wines: they’re likely to have lower biogenic amine levels, in which case, you will have identified the culprit.
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