An interesting article by wine writer Max Allen in this month’s Gourmet Traveller magazine where he subjects himself to an informal experiment regarding the effects of drinking 19 standard drinks worth of expensive wines and cheap wines on him the morning after. The two nights were a week apart, and Max had the same meal with both sets of wines.
The expensive wines included bottles over $100AUD each with Dom Perignon, Petaluma Tiers, Penfolds 707, Single Malt Whisky and so forth, with the cheap wines mostly around $5AUD a bottle including Orlando Carrington Sparkling and Riverina Chardonnay from a two litre cask.
He reported that the morning after the expensive wines that he felt eager to get out of bed, with just a distant headache, slight nausea and not much else. Yet the day after the cheap wine he”felt like a vengeful gremlin had spent the night jamming beer-sodden drink coasters into the gap between my eyeballs and their sockets” experienced heart palpitations, a migraine and was struggling to get out of bed.
Personally, I find that I do tend to not have to write off the next day if I spend the previous night drinking wines or spirits of a “higher quality” but I’m interested to see if others have the same experience.
Have you found similar results even when the gap is not so wide, say $25 wines versus drinking $10 wines, does it take a bigger gap, or does it not seem to matter at all for you?
I have given up on the “generic” spirits such as smirnoff, absolut or jim beam for that exact reason, drink the good stuff and you feel fine the next day.
I learned the hard way never to drink wine if you plan in a little over indulgance, regardless of the quality.
It’s an interesting one and I’m not sure you can categorise it by price. I think preservatives and what is used to fine the wine can have an effect too – my wife is very sensitive to this. The answer is a well made preservative free wine fined with egg whites. On the subject, I find that mass produced bottled beers are worse than wine. And having conducted a few experiments with vodka, the pricy premium brands such as 42 Below seeem to offer the purest alcohol and the clearest head the next morning. Of course, cigarettes are part of the equation too. I know several wine writers that smoke. I wonder if Max Allen did?
I have definitely noticed a difference between the “good” stuff and the “bad” stuff, but where exactly that difference is remains open for discussion. I had a lot of great, high quality mezcal a couple of weeks ago and I felt pretty good the next day. Try that with a similar quantity of bad mezcal…yuck. The same goes for wine, I’ve noticed, but I don’t really drink truly cheap wine often enough to feel terrible the next day…*)
I hate to admit this because people rarely believe it – I have never had a real hangover. Sure I feel tired, but I have never felt ill or had a headache! No matter how much I drink or how drunk I get, I always feel quite good the next day. My wife hates me for it! We have had the odd occasion (one wedding comes to mind) where my wife got absolutely hammered on champagne and spent the evening praying to the porcelain priestess however, as drunk as I was, I slept blithely through and got up and worked around the yard all day. It doesn’t appear to matter to me the quality of the wine or spirits. I am just lucky, I guess! Although, my wife swears that white wines and lower quality reds leave her feeling quite poorly the next day but good quality reds do not affect her as much.
I have noticed that if i go out on a Saturday night and drink nothing but house bourbon I find my self in real brain busting trouble the next morn. Yet if i drink Jack Daniels all night in similar or even more excessive quantities I feel comparatively much better the next day. Why is this so? Is it because of impurities in the cheaper spirits that are filtered or distilled out in the better brands?
Definitely a difference. I was drinking $6 bottles of cleanskin white wine and feeling dreadful if I overdid it. Last weekend I drank too much $20 New Zealand Sav Blanc and woke up dreading what was to come but pleasantly surprised to find that after initial tiredness I spent rest of the day feeling fine.