To Your Health

Natural wine, boozy kombucha, cannabis gin: the way we drink is the next frontier for wellness. But, writes MAX ALLEN, alcohol and wellbeing have a long history.

- Max Allen

The winemaker hands me a glass of cloudy amber-coloured fluid. He tells me it was made from organically-grown grapes, no chemicals, wild-fermented on skins, and bottled without filtration or any added preservatives. Natural wine, in other words. And then he says something I’ve heard from other natural winemakers.

“You know, wines made like this have better digestibility. You taste the vitality in them. You can drink natural wines and not feel any bad effects the next day.”

In the late 19th and early 20th century it was common to spruik wines – and other drinks, from beer to spirits to cider – by talking up their health benefits. But as social attitudes shifted and advertising codes became stricter over the ensuing decades, the idea of therapeutic drinking disappeared from booze marketing.

Today, though, as the wellness trend continues to grow at a staggering rate in the world of food, winemakers, brewers and distillers are beginning to dabble once again in semi-medical language, even making new, allegedly therapeutic products. And they often sound uncannily similar to their 19th-century predecessors.

Take our natural winemaker’s talk of “digestibility”. This was a common claim in the 19th century: Australian wine companies such as Seppelt, Penfolds and Hardys produced all sorts of drinks, from vermouth to bitters to tonic wine, that were said to be beneficial to digestive health. One vermouth, made by Melbourne wine merchant Alexander and Paterson in 1895, promised to “possess the properties of a bitter stomachic that acts like a charm, and frees the bowels from flatulency and pain”. Angaston Bitters, produced around the turn of the 20th century, was “recommended as an unfailing, quick and effective remedy for weak digestion”.