Does Natural Wine Give You a Hangover?
We’ve all heard or at least come across the conversation regarding natural wine and hangovers; does it give you a hangover? Is it just some sort of hipster myth? Well don’t worry because we’re about to debunk this one for you and finally get to the bottom of it!
The idea of getting very drunk from multiple bottles of wine or even just from a single glass of wine (if you don’t drink that often) and then waking up the next morning is an absolute dream for all, but let’s think about it with a little more realism to the situation. First and foremost, it’s just not possible to get away with not having a hangover the next morning after drinking no matter the severity, because a hangover is simply a case of the alcohol in whatever beverage(s) you drank tainting your system with all sorts of effects such as dehydration, dilated blood vessels and difficulty sleeping.
The main thing in alcohol that gives people hangovers are called congeners which are chemical by-products such as methanol, acetaldehyde and tannins. These congeners are most commonly found in higher volumes in darker alcoholic drinks like whiskey, bourbon and certain high tannin profiled red wines.
The team over at healthline.com summed up the whole hangover situation perfectly -
“the darker the drink, the more congeners there are. The more congeners there are, the more likely you are to develop a hangover”
Now onto the natural wine side of things, which is where it starts to get interesting. As you all are quite aware of, natural wine is a type of wine that’s produced with no foreign chemical additions alongside as little human intervention throughout the entire process as possible. Meaning the percentage of congeners i.e chemicals in any glass of natural wine you drink will be miniscule on a scale compared to pretty much any other drink out there apart from clear spirits like vodka.
Of course like anything in life drinking alcohol needs to be approached in moderation, by that we mean, if you went on a heavy night out with a couple friends and you three went through over ten bottles of natural wine throughout the course of the night without pacing yourselves or eating much food, there's no doubt in the world you're going to wake up the next day feeling a bit groggy and hungover, because regardless of the amount of sulfites and chemicals in those bottles of natural wine there was a whole lot of methanol which is found in all types of alcohol and that’s something that can most definitely give you a rough time the next morning!
Or you could just be tame and have a couple glasses of natural wine or maybe even three or four just because why not? And thanks to the lack of sulfites in that wine your hangover (if there even is one) will be a lot less severe, and that’s a fact.
Moral of the story - stick to the low sulfites wine whilst drinking them in moderation and you should be in the clear.
