Headaches and red wine we’ve all heard about. How about cramp and white wine, instead? No, this isn’t a new wine problem, it turns out that it’s a matter of where you live.
Wine and headaches, especially red wine and headaches have been done to death. Only last month US journalist Lettie Teague of the Wall Street Journal reported on her largely unfruitful searches for the reasons red wine might give some people a headache. But cramp? And white wine?
An experienced wine educator, I thought I’d heard it all and for years had politely – or not so politely – answered questions debunking wine and health myths, especially those around sulfur dioxide and headaches.
I’ve explained to students the benefits of judicious amounts of sulfur dioxide used by winemakers to protect wine and how very tiny numbers of people are allergic to it; how the levels are slightly higher in sweet white wines, but overall have reduced massively in the past 20 years. And, oh yes, did you know sulfur dioxide appears in commercial jams, fruit and nut preserves of all sorts and may be sprayed on salad bars?
Before last year, however, I hadn’t run wine courses in France. Now correct me if I’m wrong – and excuse any race sensitivity here – but most French people are Caucasians, right? And most British (or other Anglo-Saxons), who I’m more used to educating/entertaining about wine, are also Caucasians, right? So, therefore, we have broadly speaking the same genetic makeup or propensity to illness/disease, right?
There I was on two separate occasions, running basic wine courses for a small group of mature French men and women and, just like in the UK, the women were more curious and asking more questions. Then the question came up – exactly the same question in two groups, independently, one week apart: “Why is it that drinking white wine in the evening gives you cramp at night?”
“Huh?”
I blustered. I disbelieved. I was rude. We had already discussed organic wines, natural wines, sulfur dioxide and headaches the week before – something that my students thought was linked exclusively with white wines.
Your scribe, speaking in a foreign tongue, protested gently to her confident, mature students, that most malaises from wine in the UK were blamed on red wine, so given that they were blamed on white wine in France, could this possibly be all in the imagination of the drinker? I’m unlikely ever to get work again in France.
My audience was not amused. Surely, I must have heard about the cramp and white wine phenomenon? Everyone knew about it. Errr … not me. Not after more decades of drinking, reading about, studying and hanging out with white and red wines, their makers and drinkers than I care to admit. A new one on me, my French friends.
Perturbed at my failure to help my students, I got to thinking about it. And, I did what you do these days, I Googled the issue and then I asked social media’s hive mind.
Google “cramp white wine” and there is nothing helpful whatsoever. Plenty of erudite articles emerge citing alcohol as a trigger for cramp, mainly due to lactic acid build-up, usually caused by dehydration, but no specific reference to white wine. Google “crampes vin blanc” and the first few entries are very specific. Whereas doctors’ comments in the articles are, not surprisingly, cautious, even they bring up white wine as a possibly the worst alcohol to drink if you are prone to cramp. As ever with polemic it’s in the comments and the wine forums where the most strident opinions arise. Wine drinkers stating that their physiotherapist has told them absolutely never to drink white wine; some more learned comments about avoiding white wines that have been through malolactic fermentation, and so on.
As for my Facebook followers, to my relief one British wine writer living in Paris confirmed to me that he heard this all the time from his French family and friends, and a French wine colleague in the UK told me her mother won’t drink white wine for precisely the same reason. I wasn’t going mad, after all. As for the non-French, more people said they had a problem with red (Wine-Searcher’s very own Tom Jarvis suggested on social media that higher levels of histamines were more likely to cause cramp, and red wine has more histamine than white.) So, what’s up with the French?
Here’s my conclusion. For the French, as with most of these food/drink tales, the problem is received wisdom, or old wives’ tales. But it is also circumstantial. Take this scenario: Madame French is an occasional or even regular wine drinker, but almost exclusively drinks red. However, on a hot evening in mid-summer, she is tempted to drink some chilled white wine. It refreshes the palate more than the red, especially early in the evening, so she drinks a second glass. So thirst-quenching is the white wine that she continues, and later, as normal in a jolly evening, she goes on to red wine with her meal.
It was hot. Madame French had her thirst quenched by the white wine, so she drank much less water than she normally does, and with the red wine that followed she ended up drinking much more wine that she normally would do over an evening. Dehydration. Cramp. Old wives’ tale unpicked.
And by the way, there are far more articles in French about white wines causing headaches than red wines.
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