In the world of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), each food has medicinal qualities and energetics. This simply means that there are reasons it would help some people and harm others. One of my goals as an acupuncturist and practitioner of TCM is to help people begin to think of their food medicinally. For example, if you have a headache or an upset stomach you don’t necessarily need to go into your medicine cabinet. There are foods and herbal teas which can solve the problem just as well. One example that not everyone would think of is red wine! This discussion of red wine will hopefully help you decide when it might be a good idea to have a glass or two, and when you might want to pass. Just to be clear up front, all the benefits I’m describing only happen with a glass or two of red wine, and only when needed! More frequent consumption will definitely create more problems than you started with. Alcohol increases circulation, warms the body and dries fluids in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Red wine is thought to be more warming than white. None of this is really surprising- we know it’s a bit dehydrating, it makes you feel warmer and more lively, right? But how can we apply this knowledge to our health? Start to think about conditions in which there is too much cold and stagnant blood or energy in your body. The first thing that comes to mind is arthritis pain- especially for people who have increased pain in cold weather or damp weather. Traumatic injuries can also benefit from red wine- the wine helps increase circulation and prevents scar tissue formation, but circulation is not so strongly increased as to increase bleeding. One example of pain which generally does NOT benefit from red wine is headaches. This is because in TCM alcohol causes the qi to rush upwards, which can make your headache worse. Another reason you might drink red wine is for menstrual cramps. Since the goal is for a woman to fully shed the uterine lining with minimal cramping and clotting (both are signs of blood stagnation), one glass of red wine daily while cramps persist can be beneficial.

The same goes for the postpartum period. While there is bleeding and the body is healing, the goal is to gently facilitate circulation but not so much that it increases the bleeding. Small (less than a glass) servings of red wine can aid in the postpartum recovery process.  Be sure to consult with your pediatrician or lactation consultant for tips on how to safely combine alcohol and breastfeeding- it IS possible! In TCM, excessive consumption of alcohol is quite damaging- no surprise there. It increases dampness (weight gain and fluid retention) and increases heat (inflammation). Both dampness and heat accumulate and as a result damage the digestion, sleep, mood and can exacerbate skin issues such as acne and rosacea.  It therefore makes sense that if you are a person who already has excess heat in your body (always feel hot, eat lots of spicy foods, red skin or eyes, sweat easily), you should probably avoid red wine. If you must have a glass of wine, choose a more cooling white wine instead.

Does red wine ease menstrual cramps? Does evidence support red wine for menstrual cramp prevention?Never let it be said that we at RealClimate don’t work for our readers. Since a commenter mentioned the medieval vineyards in England, I’ve been engaged on a quixotic quest to discover the truth about the oft-cited, but seldom thought through, claim that the existence of said vineyards a thousand years ago implies that a ‘Medieval Warm Period‘ was obviously warmer than the current climate (and by implication that human-caused global warming is not occuring). best red wine quotesThis claim comes up pretty frequently, and examples come from many of the usual suspects e.g. Singer (2005), and Baliunas (in 2003). buy used wooden wine cratesThe basic idea is that i) vineyards are a good proxy for temperature, ii) there were vineyards in England in medieval times, iii) everyone knows you don’t get English wine these days, iv) therefore England was warmer back then, and v) therefore increasing greenhouse gases have no radiative effect. where to buy wine in san jose

I’ll examine each of these propositions in turn (but I’ll admit the logic of the last step escapes me). I’ll use two principle sources, the excellent (and cheap) “Winelands of Britain” by geologist Richard C. Selley and the website of the English Wine Producers.what is the best wine on a diet Are vineyards a good temperature proxy? good wine to cook withWhile climate clearly does impact viticulture through the the amount of sunshine, rainfall amounts, the number of frost free days in the spring and fall, etc., there a number of confounding factors that make it less than ideal as a long term proxy. best wine courses londonThese range from changing agricultural practices, changing grape varieties, changing social factors and the wider trade environment.

For instance, much early winemaking in England was conducted in Benedictine monasteries for religious purposes – changing rites and the treatment of the monasteries by the crown (Henry VIII in particular) clearly impacted wine production there. Societal factors range from the devastating (the Black Death) to the trivial (working class preferences for beer over wine). The wider trade environment is also a big factor i.e. how easy was it to get better, cheaper wine from the continent? The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the English King in 1152 apparently allowed better access to the vineyards of Bordeaux, and however good medieval English wine was, it probably wasn’t a match for that! However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that climate is actually the dominant control – so what does the history of English vineyards show? The earliest documentation that is better than anecdotal is from the Domesday Book (1087) – an early census that the new Norman king commissioned to assess his new English dominions, including the size of farms, population etc.

Being relatively ‘frenchified’, the Normans (who had originally come from Viking stock) were quite keen on wine drinking (rather than mead or ale) and so made special note of existing vineyards and where the many new vines were being planted. Sources differ a little on how many vineyards are included in the book: Selley quotes Unwin (J. Wine Research, 1990 (subscription)) who records 46 vineyards across Southern England (42 unambiguous sites, 4 less direct), but other claims (unsourced) range up to 52. Lamb’s 1977 book has a few more from other various sources and anecdotally there are more still, and so clearly this is a minimum number. Of the Domesday vineyards, all appear to lie below a line from Ely (Cambridgeshire) to Gloucestershire. Since the Book covers all of England up to the river Tees (north of Yorkshire), there is therefore reason to think that there weren’t many vineyards north of that line. Lamb reports two vineyards to the north (Lincoln and Leeds, Yorkshire) at some point between 1000 and 1300 AD, and Selley even reports a Scottish vineyard operating in the 12th Century.

However, it’s probably not sensible to rely too much on these single reports since they don’t necessarily come with evidence for successful or sustained wine production. Indeed, there is one lone vineyard reported in Derbyshire (further north than any Domesday vineyard) in the 16th Century when all other reports were restricted to the South-east of England. Wine making never completely died out in England, there were always a few die-hard viticulturists willing to give it a go, but production clearly declined after the 13th Century, had a brief resurgence in the 17th and 18th Centuries, only to decline to historic lows in the 19th Century when only 8 vineyards are recorded. Contemporary popular sentiment towards English (and Welsh) wine can be well judged by a comment in ‘Punch’ (a satirical magazine) that the wine would require 4 people to drink it – one victim, two to hold him down, and one other to pour the wine down his throat. Unremarked by most oenophiles though, English and Welsh wine production started to have a renaissance in the 1950s.

By 1977, there were 124 reasonable-sized vineyards in production – more than at any other time over the previous millennium. This resurgence was also unremarked upon by Lamb, who wrote in that same year that the English climate (the average of 1921-1950 to be precise) remained about a degree too cold for wine production. Thus the myth of the non-existant English wine industry was born and thrust headlong into the climate change debate… Since 1977, a further 200 or so vineyards have opened (currently 400 and counting) and they cover a much more extensive area than the recorded medieval vineyards, extending out to Cornwall, and up to Lancashire and Yorkshire where the (currently) most northerly commercial vineyard sits. So with the sole exception of one ‘rather improbably’ located 12th Century Scottish vineyard (and strictly speaking that doesn’t count, it not being in England ‘n’ all…), English vineyards have almost certainly exceeded the extent of medieval cultivation.

And I hear (from normally reliable sources) they are actually producing a pretty decent selection of white wines. So what should one conclude from this? Well, one shouldn’t be too dogmatic that English temperatures are now obviously above a medieval peak – the impact of confounding factors in wine production precludes such a clear conclusion (and I am pretty agnostic with regards to the rest of the evidence of whether northern Europe was warmer 1000 years than today). However, one can conclude that those who are using the medieval English vineyards as a ‘counter-proof’ to the idea of present day global warming are just blowing smoke (or possibly drinking too much Californian). If they are a good proxy, then England is warmer now, and if they are not…. well, why talk about them in this context at all? There is a bigger issue of course. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that medieval times were as warm in England as they are today, and even that global temperatures were similar (that’s a much bigger leap, but no mind).

What would that imply for our attribution of current climate changes to human causes? Well, warm periods have occured in the past, and if not the medieval period, then probably the last interglacial (120,000 years ago), certainly the Pliocene (3 million years ago), without question the (Eocene 50 million years), and in particular the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (55 million years ago), and so on. Current theories of climate change do not rely on whether today’s temperatures are ‘unprecedented’. Instead they examine the physical causes of climate change and match up what we know about their physical effects and time history and see which of the multiple drivers or combination can best explain the observations. For the last few decades, that is quite clearly the rise in greenhouse gases, punctuated by the occasional volcano and mitigated slightly by the concomittant rise in particulate pollution. Understanding past climate changes are of course also very interesting – they provide test cases for climate models and can have profound implications for the history of human society.