Raising A Toast To Champagne!

Champagne may likely be the greatest achievement in marketing ever. Manufacturers in the 1600's began a concerted effort to associate their particular sparkling wine with royalty, and laws forbidding other sparkling wines from outside France's Champagne region to copy its name protected those efforts.

Ironically, recent discoveries about the health benefits of champagne may make current manufacturers regret their ancestors' campaign to make the rest of us associate champagne only with special occasions.

For example, research out of the University of Reading indicates that one to three glasses a week may counteract memory loss linked with aging and protect the brain from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The science behind this is contained in the phenolic compounds in the Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, and Chardonnay that are the primarygrapes used in champagne. These chemicals favorably alter a number of proteins associated with storage of memory in the brain. As you age, many of these proteins get diminished, thereby making memory storage less efficient. Drinking champagne actually slows the losses of such proteins and prevents cognitive losses arising out of brain aging.

These polyphenols are also antioxidants, and so help lower your blood pressure, reducing the risk of heart problems and strokes. They do this by slowing down the removal of nitric acid from the blood. In fact, a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition showed that when two groups were given either champagne or a different alcoholic control beverage, only the champagne drinkers experienced the slower removal of nitric acid.

Champagne can also improve your spatial memory – that ability to recognize one’s surroundings, as well as perform complex tasks and calculations.

Most people watching their weight won't care how good it is for their heart, they're accustomed to shunning alcoholic beverages due to their high caloric content. For these wary souls, we say, “drink up!” Champagne not only contains fewer calories than beer or other wines, tradition serves it up in smaller glasses than any other adult beverage. What's more, the bubbles in champagne will cause you to drink more slowly and feel more full, more quickly. This means that you will generally have drunk less at the end of the night than if you were knocking back beers or red wine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right.” Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Even the scientists who are busy dissecting the hidden benefits of France's famous bubbly still can only recommend you drink no more than 3 glasses a week.

Here's to your health!