Sunday, April 15, 2007

Red Wine is Good for you......but which red wine is best?

A lot of publicity has entered the media recently telling us how good a moderate daily intake of red wine is, because of something called poly phenols. Some red wines it has been established are better for you than others, the one that came top was a wine called Madiran, this wine comes from the foothills of the Pyrenees in the southwest of France. Madiran is made with 40 - 70 percent tannat grapes, is deep purple, tannic and delicious with a bowl of hearty vegetable soup or a full on roast dinner.
Woody Allen is a fan of the wine, when asked what food he would recommend that this wine should be drunk with he stated "an elephant burger" needles to say it's a food wine.

All red wines have this particular group of poly phenols (procyanidin) but with modern wine making methods much of the procyanidin is stripped out, the wine requires at least 10 days contact with the grape skins and to be made in the old fashioned way for want of a better description, with the grapes being grown at high altitude and from low yeilding vines to be able to offer maximum health benefit.
Basic mass produced wines don't normaly meet all of these criteria. A nice statistic I was quoted says that more procyanidin can be found in one glass of Madiran than in two bottles of Aussie red wine.

Madiran retails here in the UK between £6.00 and £30.00 a bottle, if you have not tried it, give it a go, for something just a little different.

If you would like to learn more of the health benefits of wine check out Roger Corders book called The Wine Diet.

All red wine is of course very good for you........in moderation.

"Wine is a food, a medicine and a poison - it's just a question of dose".
Paracelsus.

3 comments:

Lighthouse said...

great varied blog steve
enjoying learning about wines, gozo, joost tv, blogging...
thank you!
pjoe in dublin

Lighthouse said...

Madiran as medicine, now there's a thought
....in moderation of course!

Unknown said...

Thanks for the kind comments panta rei.
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