Red wine, in moderation, can be good for you, so drink up,writes Joe Breen
Roger Corder's The Wine Diet("Drink red wine every day. Eat fruit and berries, nuts and chocolate. Enjoy a longer, healthier life") is, just like certain red wines, coming down with procyanidins and polyphenols which are good guys in the battle against heart disease. But this fascinating book is also rich with scientific detail, advice and argument, which can be boiled down to the maxim that alcohol, especially red wine, and dark chocolate, are good for us, in moderation.
Corder is professor of experimental therapeutics at the William Harvey Research Institute in London, a leading centre of cardiovascular research. He sets out his stall in the opening chapter: "Wine drinkers are generally healthier and often live longer. This is not just wishful thinking. I've spent many years researching the health-giving benefits of wine and have found that wine drinkers have less heart disease and diabetes, and are also less likely to suffer from dementia in old age. Is this the wine, their diet or their lifestyle? Well, it is probably a mixture of all three."
Corder then sets out to prove his thesis. And mighty convincing he is, too. The first major section of the 250-plus pages deals with the issue of whether or not red wine is good for you and, if so, how good? How often should we drink it, and how much should we drink? The answers to these questions are invariably complex, but central to the answers is a substance called procyanidin.
Polyphenols are a group of chemical substances found in plants, and procyanidin is the name given to "the most abundant polyphenol in young red wines". Corder describes procyanidin, which is also found in cranberries and dark chocolate, as the key health-giving component in wine. "Experimental studies show that red wine polyphenols protect the endothelium (the cells lining blood vessels) from raised LDL cholesterol. This supports the idea that red wine provides the explanation for the French paradox - the low level of heart disease in France despite high consumption of saturated fat."
But not all red wines do the trick. Those great bottles of 1989 Bordeaux waiting to be drunk will have only marginal, if any, amounts of procyanidin. This is because procyanidin comes from the pips and helps form the tannins which then soften and disappear through ageing.
Top of Corder's list are red wines from the Madiran in south-west France, which are made mainly from the Tannat grape, which is high in tannin. It would be hard to drink a young Tannat wine on its own, so Corder suggests drinking it with food. Professor Corder's book, complete with recipes and sample menus, is actually a "complete nutrition and lifestyle plan" which can include daily modest wine consumption. Sounds good to me.
• The Wine Diet, by Roger Corder, is published by Sphere (£9.99 in UK)