Wednesday 6/12
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off wines tasted

Is wine good for you? The cold answer is no, wine is not good for you. Despite the aegis “natural wine,” which we desperately want to believe is a-ok simply because it is wine grown and made without added crap, the unhappy truth is that if you evaluate wine qua health food, it will receive a failing grade. As little as one daily glass of any alcoholic beverage, even one that is natural, may have in the long run a less than salubrious effect on your longevity, brain health, and gut microbiome: but how to evaluate the risk of moderate wine consumption against the backdrop of the myriad other daily risks we take but rarely give a second thought? Driving, of course, is not good for you; there is always a quantifiable risk, regardless of how gracefully you manage an automobile, that you will have an unfortunate encounter with a testosterone-poisoned chud who runs a red light. Living in a big city, even in the age of unleaded gas and catalytic converters, is not good for you. Some natural wine advocates glibly point to low sulfite wine as the solution, and indeed wines with lower sulfites reduce (but do not eliminate) the quantity of that bad boy, acetaldehyde, produced in your liver, but acetaldehyde is hardly the only physiological issue with drinking wine. And in the end, even the practice of the best physicians is predicated on the placebo effect, as no nostrum can in the end save us. Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse, and pass the Ripple.

On a lighter note, is wine good for you? The happy answer is yes, wine is good for you. The Blue Zone of Sardinia boasts an unusual number of centenarians—medical researchers hypothesize that it’s a function of consuming olive oil and the exceptionally high level of anthocyanins in Sardinian cannonau red wine, but perhaps even more importantly a key to their longevity is the social connection that older Sardinian folks maintain on the island, hanging out and drinking a little wine with their friends and family. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew this too, and indeed built special rooms in their homes to host all-night wine drinking symposia during which they discussed and debated everything important in life. A conversation and connection fueled and enabled by wine, the hidden interlocutor.

I believe that viewing wine through any instrumental lens is a priori a dead end. We drink wine less as a means to an end (Buzzballz are certainly a cheaper and more expedient way to get your drink on) and more so as an end in itself. Wine lights our brains up in ways that the other things we put in our mouths do not. We’re tasting five different pétillant naturel wines this evening, ranging from the simple and fresh to the not-so-simple yet still fresh. Pét-nats, if you are susceptible to their charms, have a way of entraining us as a group, largely in part due to a shared physiological response to carbonic acid in our mouths that, again, only if you are susceptible to them, has a way of bringing our Venn diagrams a little closer together, if only for a few moments. Let us see where we will end up.