Recently took a trip to Oaxaca (“highly recommended” would be a massive understatement). We visited several Mezcal tasting rooms and a palenque.
In several places, we discussed the distillation process, which I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with. The “heads,” the first stuff that comes out of the still, is typically discarded. Reasons cited include that it does not taste very good, but it also contains a disproportionate amount of methanol, which is toxic.
This got me thinking, pertaining to wine…
If you distill wine, you get brandy. When you distill it, you throw out the first part of the distillate. But when you drink wine, you drink that stuff.
So, when we drink wine, are we drinking stuff that could be problematic? Anecdotally, I will say that there were two or three, or possibly more, days on which we drank fairly prodigious amounts of Mezcal, and I did not perceive the intense hangover that I would have experienced with an equally potent amount of wine. Again, anecdote, but it made me wonder, which is the reason for this post. Curious on what people think about this.
I am no expert, but distilling concentrates elements in the base wine. It’s one thing to concentrate ethanol, and it’s another to concentrate methanol. Plus, a little Googling suggests that their ratio can change via distillation so you end up with proportionally more methanol.
[Edited]
The treatment for methanol poisoning is to consume ethanol. Your body preferentially metabolizes the ethanol and you just pee out the methanol. So I assume that the issue is just the ratio of methanol to ethanol in what you are consuming. In fermented products, the ratio should be very low. In the head of a distillation, the ratio may be quite high as to be problematic.
The amount of methanol in wine is significantly less harmful than the amount of ethanol in wine. Usually around 50-250 ppm. There’s a small amount of methanol in a variety of crushed fruit products - including juice and wine - because it’s a byproduct of enzymatic pectin breakdown.
Is this the time when we talk about Velcorin? 