Why do some wines give me headaches?

Not all wines are created equal. In fact, not all alcohols are created equal. It’s convenient and easy for us to think of any alcoholic beverage as somewhat interchangeable from another from a health standpoint, but that honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. Wine can range the entire spectrum from being health-positive all the way to health-destructive — based on the wine itself and, of course, the amount consumed.

*It’s important to state here at the outset that we at unPINNED are not health or nutrition experts, so please consult a medical professional for any proper health advice. That said, we are “experts” on not getting hungover… so there is that.

There are a few reasons as to some wines might give you a headache, but almost all of them — outside of some kind of idiosyncratic allergy or intolerance — boil down to one categorical cause: bad quality.

This is what I look like after drinking even half a glass of bad quality wine.

It’s not a pretty picture.

The alcohol industry is unique in that ingredients and nutrition facts are not published on the packaging unlike pretty much every other consumable good in the U.S. If it were widely known how caloric alcohol is or how many additives most alcoholic beverages have, the industry would crater. Given this lack of transparency, it’s highly commonplace for companies to load up their products with a whole lot of “ingredients” that are terrible for you. In wine specifically, these “ingredients” can include freeze-dried tannins, sugars, enzymes, oak chips, tartaric acid, artificial flavorings, and so on.

Wines that have more chemicals and additives in them are worse for you, and your body will react with headaches, inflammation, nausea, etc. Wines that have fewer additives (or better yet, none!), are better for you, and you’ll have less of a reaction. Natural wines are a style of winemaking with essentially nothing but grapes — these are the best wines you can find when it comes to supporting a healthy lifestyle and not getting headaches.

Here’s a rhetorical question that’s somewhat illustrative of the point above: is it healthier to eat organic strawberries or strawberry-flavored fruit snacks?

Obviously, it’s healthier to eat the organic strawberries. Same deal with the wine; it’s way healthier to drink the real thing than some fake-version of it. The fake stuff gives you headaches in the short-run and is likely to shorten your life in the long-run.