A fellow faculty member at UCLA told me he stopped drinking wine because he develops a very nonspecific malaise the morning after. This is not headache or migraine variant. He is not drinking enough to cause dehydration or hangover. This kind of thing is tangential to my own academic interests but I have been contacting various wine academics and wine makers. The consensus is that this is not due to sulfites. I posted some of our communications below. No one really knows :
Peter
Do you think it is worth me giving this guy a bottle of your biodynamic wine to see if it does not cause his illness, which he says is NOT a headache. I am also looking into biogenic amines as a cause. I may tell him to take an antihistamine prior to consummation
DEFINE_ME
from a wine academic:
By chance we are looking into a general “headache” response to wine. It is likely to be related to this issue. A sulfites reaction is unlikely, but he could try orange dried apricots to see if that produces a response. For now, let me suggest he try drinking low alcohol wines (13.0% and lower). I can suggest Matthiason or Stoumen or Clime, but there are others. Unfortunately, the alcohol label is not a reliable indication of actual alcohol concentration.
This is not exactly the right forum to bring this up since people regularly drinking wine do not have such problems but has anyone heard of such a thing or have any further information?