A recent article suggests that Men are twice as likely as women to claim to be wine experts with 30 percent claiming they have used bluster when discussing wine, mainly to impress a date or look like they have a large amount of wine knowledge when they are drinking with friends. Fred Sirieix, star of Channel 4’s First Dates, said that the air of snobbery around wine ‘makes people think they have to be an expert in order to talk about it and enjoy it, when that is simply not the case’.
It also appears that a quarter of shoppers spend more than ten minutes trying to choose which wine to buy. About a third feel overwhelmed by the sheer choice while more than half admit that they don’t know which wines they like or dislike. One in six under 25’s take more than 15 minutes choosing which wine to buy. Incredibly the time we take deliberating over what to purchase in supermarket wine sections adds up to 50 million wasted hours per year!
So if all of this seems stressful, there is a simple answer – drink the wine (responsibly). Having the occasional drink can lower stress levels. A study in the journal of American College Of Cardiology suggests that regular low levels of alcohol were found to lead to long term reductions of stress signalling associated with heart attacks and strokes. Researchers studied data of more than 50,000 Americans and brain scans of 754. Scans showed that moderate drinkers had less stress signalling in the amygdala, a brain area associated with stress responses. Light to moderate drinkers also had fewer past heart attacks and strokes.
