Better wine makes even non-experts happier, brain tests show
"Good wine" makes for "good people," according to Guilford, a character in the William Shakespeare/John Fletcher play Henry VIII. In Homer’s Iliad, wine is lauded as restoring a tired man’s strength.
Such fictional accolades are not too far off the mark, going by recent tests in Italy, which showed high-quality wine as making people feel happy - or at least more so than cheaper alternatives.
Wine "undoubtedly generates a significant emotional response," the nature of which depends on "the quality level of the wine tasted," according to a team from the University of Pisa and the National Research Council of Italy.
The researchers used brain sensors to track emotions among people who were given five wines to sample while listening to live jazz.
"High-quality wines are able to induce a spectrum of positive emotions, as observed by the analysis of ECG signals, especially when they are coupled with background music," the team said in findings published by the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.
The researchers said that the outcome was similar for participants who are not regular drinkers, much less connoisseurs, as they observed "positive emotional characteristics on the palate even of some less experienced consumers."
Any short-term benefit of drinking wine is likely to be outweighed by long-term risks, however, and research has established that alcohol use is associated with a wide range of diseases, including 4% of the world's cancer cases.
