Box Wines
A wine blog with news and reviews of affordable wines

You don’t actually DRINK wine, you TASTE it, right? After inhaling the wine’s nose for a while, you carefully slosh some of the liquid around in your mouth, seeing how it affects different parts of your tongue. You let a few wine molecules drift down your throat to be sure the back of your tongue gets a chance to contribute to evaluating the wine, and spit the rest out. Right? Well, for those of you who occasionally let more than those few molecules down your gullet, and may occasionally even appreciate the mood-altering effects wine or spirits, CalWineries has a guide to optimizing your buzz.

The site notes that “people drink alcohol because it makes them feel good. But that’s true only up to a certain point, after which alcohol makes you feel worse, then bad, then sick, then…well…dead.” They provide a somewhat unscientific but probably qualitatively accurate graph that shows how initially, increased blood alcohol produces a positive mood swing, while consuming more alcohol eventually sends you on a downward slope of feeling worse, and eventually, feeling nothing. “After you pass your optimum buzz, increases in your blood alcohol content (BAC) are not only going to make you feel worse, but are another nail in the hangover coffin. Depending on the person, the ‘best’ feelings from alcohol come when your BAC is between 0.03 and 0.12.” That’s quite a range, but no doubt the value for most people is in that range somewhere.

They also provide a chart for weight and alcohol consumption to let the user calculate how much alcohol it takes to achive a more or less optimum BAC level and then how much to maintain that level. Wine and beer drinkers have an easier time of it than spirits drinkers, no doubt, since the alcohol content is lower and it’s easier to stretch a glass of wine or a bottle of beer than, say, a neat single-malt scotch. It also means that wine drinkers can consume at a comfortable pace for a bit longer before approaching the point of declining returns compared to, say, someone knocking back vodka martinis, and that there’s somewhat lower probability of overshooting. The latter might occur when the individual reaches his personal optimum, but already has consumed a drink or two which haven’t been absorbed yet.

You can do the math using the data on the CalWineries site to calculate the effects of what you are drinking on a person of your weight. As a really rough rule of thumb for wine drinkers, though, it looks to us like once you are in your optimal zone, limiting your consumption to about a glass of wine per hour will keep your BAC more or less constant. Drink more, and you risk continuing to increase your BAC and the negative factors associated with that. Remember, real-world results vary greatly depending on the individual’s weight and how they metabolize the alcohol.

I should point out that some of the “optimal” range described in the article is at a level which would make it illegal to drive a motor vehicle in most states, not to mention making it downright dumb to operate a chain saw or nail gun. So, if you decide to try optimizing your buzz, please do so in a safe, responsible, and legal manner!

Add this post to: del.icio.us - Digg it - Stumble it - Furl - Yahoo MyWeb