Phillip Norrie, a Sydney GP and former wine-maker, has created a wine which cleans your blood vessels as you drink it. This reduces the risk of coronary heart diseases and strokes.
Resvera-what?
He has produced a wine with 100 times the amount of resveratrol as other normal wines. For those quaffers, who are saying resvera-what… resveratrol is the antioxidant that gives wine its health giving properties.
It is found in the skin of grapes and is widely known to combat heart disease but is usually found in rather small quantities in wine – between 3 and 6 milligrams per litre in red wine, and just one milligram per litre in white wine.
Vascular pipe-cleaner
By infusing wine with 100 mg per litre of resveratrol, he has produced a “vascular pipe-cleaner”, the ground-breaking doctor told The Times.
Dr Norrie, an expert on the links between wine and health, has spent three years patenting a method of extracting the anti-oxidant from the skin of red and white grapes and concentrating it before returning it to the wine in the bottling process.
‘The Wine Doctor’ first released the R.E.W (Resveratrol Enhanced Wine) 2006 Chardonnay and the R.E.W 2005 Shiraz in late October 2008. Each with 100mg/l of resveratrol per bottle – as much as is contained in about 85 bottles of standard white wine or about 20 bottles of standard red.
According to Dr Norrie the taste of the wine is not affected at all as the resveratrol is neutral in taste, bouquet and colour. Australian wine makers have confirmed that his wine tastes no different from others and he is currently in talks with some of Australia’s largest wine producers to use his methods.
The pipe-cleaning wine has also been endorsed by a cardiologist at the University of Queensland who reiterates that studies have proven that drinking wine that is rich in resveratrol can lessen cardio-vascular diseases and also slow down the ageing process.
Now that is a prescription a wine drinker could definitely follow.