A Chilled Glass of Rocket Fuel Please! How white wine can be a woman’s downfall…

It looks nice doesn’t it? The lovely Chablis, chilling in the fridge, the glasses gleaming and ready to accept a generous glug… We’ve all been there, Friday evening, the end of a long week and we go home or meet friends in a bar and go straight to the fridge or to the bar and order a large glass of chilled Sauvignon Blanc or just get a bottle! But where does the evening go from there? In my case, it was often down hill and it took less time than I thought to get there!

So, does white wine turn women into monsters? 

The slightly depressing answer here is that white wine is likely to affect women in a more intense way than men and can have a really negative impact on how women metabolise the liquid. This isn’t a sexist ‘women can’t handle their drink’ statement, it’s biological. The bottom line is women react more quickly to alcohol, it doesn’t come down to the size of the women’s frame as some seem to think… Even if a woman is the same size as a man, or larger, she will have more body fat and less body water. Alcohol is distributed in body water, so you’ll therefore have a higher proportion of booze flowing through your bloodstream.

White wine, lady petrol, rocket fuel… has largely become known as ‘a women’s drink of choice. Huge amounts of women (and their partners) have cited white wine for turning them into monsters. After doing crazy and unmentionable things. that they regret the second they wake up – that’s if they remember the evening at all. I’ve been there and that feeling is just dreadful.

The trouble is considering how much we buy and drink, we have very little clue as to what’s in it. There are theories batted around in the industry about the negative impact of white wine ranging from its super high sugar content — astonishingly, it has up to ten times more sugar than red wine — and levels of sulphites, which are added as a preservative. And some also believe high levels of pesticides could be to blame too. We don’t know how many pesticides have been used in the making of the wine – there are often hundreds used and very little legislation in place to control it in many winemaking countries. Despite all of this, many just believe that women are drinking too much, too quickly.

A large (250ml) glass we mustn’t forget, is in fact a third of a bottle. It ought to arrive nice and chilled and the acidity, of course, makes it seem refreshing… and there lies the dangerous bit. Us women are reportedly more likely to drink this amount  in 10-15 minutes…that’s potentially up to three units of alcohol being loaded into our bloodstream at top speed. If we’re with a man who’s drinking pints, which is weaker at 2 units, (also, men take on average 20-25 minutes to drink a pint) you can begin to see how much more alcohol we have mainlining into our system and why we might be a lot more drunk than the men we are hanging out with. 

There’s a lot of British Women Drinking White Wine

A YouGov survey showed that wine became they UK’s favourite alcoholic drink last year – enjoyed by 33 million people. Research also stated that over the last year wine was drunk by 81% of people beating beer and spirits (both at 79%) to the top spot! A recent study commissioned by Wine Drinkers UK, showed 39% of women list wine as their favourite tipple – while only 16% listed wine as their top choice.

It turns out the White wine doesn’t love us back!

It’s due to our female makeup – having more body fat and water to distribute the alcohol that makes us not only get pissed

quicker but our hangovers worse than men, even if we drank
the same amount – yikes! So, whatever it is that makes us love
white wines so much – the fact that we are heavily marketed to,
easy access, it’s chilled refreshing promise at the end of a hard day… combine it with our ever-quickening rate of drinking, high
sugar levels, a few unknowns such as pesticides and high
sulphur levels and why not add in an empty stomach – come on, we’ve all done it… anyway, us women need to chill out and lay off the chilled stuff because it’s laterally sending us nuts and making us highly susceptible to disease.

On a lighter note there are fantastic solutions, PHEW – see some great suggestions of what we should we drink, or
alternate our usual white wine options!