One More Reason Why The Wine Industry Needs To Get Off Its Lazy A**

The U.S. wine industry’s smugly malignant lack of leadership on the health issues represents a failure of vision that grows more epic with every mounting headline such as this one:

Antioxidant found in red wine may actually undo the effects of exercise

The public’s getting a new wave of slanted headlines about how red wine is bad for your health.

But if one actually reads the scientific papers, one finds that for wine-based resveratrol to have ANY effect — good or bad — one needs to drink many hundreds of bottles of wine.

But the wine industry has no one — supports no one — who reads the papers on a consistent basis to accurately report that. fact.

Further, industry indolence means it  has made no effort to broadly disseminate the scant information actually available.

The scientifically worded effort by Curt Ellison and others at the Boston School of Public Health (Critiques of Recent Publications) is a worthy start. But it goes absolutely nowhere without the ability to translate the findings into something that consumers and editors can easily understand, then push that information out broadly.

The title of that web site: Critiques of Recent Publications is hardly the sort of thing that would attract attention by anyone, editors or consumers. It doesn’t even talk about health … or even wine. It’s a non-starter until it gets wider distribution.

The captains of the wine industry — from the Wine Institute to Constellation, Gallo and other large wineries — have also fallen into the resveratrol trap: It’s the alcohol in moderation — not the trace compounds — that allow moderate consumers to live longer, healthier lives than abusers or abstainers.

But none of those who should be leading the industry have accepted the challenge to make sure the public gets a balanced and scientifically accurate picture. That’s just lazy, dumb and short-sighted. And pitiful in its own way.

Think about that as you look through a sampling of today’s articles, below.