I love wine. Yes I am a health and wellness advocate but also love wine. For a long time, and still occasionally, I battled if I am being a hypocrite in this wellness world by drinking wine. During my Health Coach education, I learned about Blue Zones. I found Blue Zones to be fascinating because I truly believe genetics dictates our disease risk very little. Instead it is your lifestyle and environment. The founder of Blue Zones teamed up with the National Geographic to study the areas where people lived the longest to try and figure out what they had in common. They ended up with 5 healthiest areas and 9 criteria that most everyone in those cultures met in their daily lifestyle. I was excited to hear wine consumption was one of Power 9!
They coined it Wine @5:
People in all Blue Zones (except Adventists) drink alcohol moderately and regularly. Moderate drinkers outlive non-drinkers. The trick is to drink 1-2 glasses per day (preferably Sardinian Cannonau wine), with friends and/or with food. And no, you can’t save up all week and have 14 drinks on Saturday.
Why is wine considered good for you?
Alcohol is known to be toxic, but many scientific studies actually correlate drinking wine with improved health. There are studies that correlate wine and improved heart health, a lower risk for diabetes, stress reduction, and a longer life.
Grapes contain polyphenols. The polyphenols protect the grapes against fungi, bacteria, frost, and other harsh growing conditions. When you drink the wine, those polyphenols protect you in a similar way. They neutralize damaging free radicals that stress your cells. Natural wines – without chemicals or additives – have a diverse variety of polyphenols, including Resveratrol (lowers inflammation), Procyanidins (strong antioxidants), Ellagic acid (helps regulate blood sugar), and many more.
Natural Wines are the ideal alcohol choice to maximize the health benefits (like all those polyphenols!) and minimize the negatives and in 2017, I found a wine company, that took the health of wine drinking to another level.
Keep reading to see how you can get a bottle of this company’s wine for only a PENNY!
Introducing Dry Farm Wines
Dry Farm Wines is the world’s only health-conscious and lab tested Natural Wine Club. Every bottle is lab tested and guaranteed to be:
- Sugar-Free (< 1g/L)
- Low Sulfites (< 75ppm)
- Low Alcohol (< 12.5%)
- Mycotoxin/Mold-Free
- Additive-Free
- Dry-Farmed (No Irrigation)
- Organically or Biodynamically Grown
- Hand harvested
- Fermented with Wild Native Yeast
- Made in Small Productions
- Gluten Free
- Paleo-Friendly
- Keto-Friendly
- Low Carb-Friendly
- Mouth-Wateringly Delicious
I want to dive into a few of these a bit more so you can understand how these criteria are different than conventional wine.
Sugar
Fructose and glucose are the two main sugars found in grapes, and they are present in wines that are not fully fermented. Fructose is not metabolized well in the human body and is a major contributor to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.
Most commercial wines are bottled before they fully ferment to speed up production and maximize profits. A wine is “dry” when the yeast fully ferments all the available sugar into alcohol, leaving behind no residual sugar.
Some winemakers also add sugar or high fructose corn syrup to their wine, a process called chaptalization, to appeal to a sweeter American palate and boost alcohol content.
Sugar in wine can be as high as 300g/L and some modern wines have more sugar than a liter of cola!
On a side note, sugar is also a main culprit in hangovers.
Dry Farm Wine Guarantee: Sugar-Free (< 1g/L)
Additives
Commercial wine producers use additives for consistency – they’re making millions of bottles, and they want them all to look and taste the same. In the United States, wine producers can use 76 different additives in wine, without disclosing any of them on the bottle. This includes substances such as ammonium phosphate, fish bladder, casein, polyvinyl-polypyr-rolidone (PVPP), defoaming agents, artificial coloring (virtually every red wine under $20 has the colorant “mega purple”), extra sugar, high fructose corn syrup, ammonia (part of the reason low-quality wine makes you nauseous the next morning), and genetically modified bacteria and yeasts.
Unlike other food and beverages, wine bottles do not require a nutrition label or ingredients to be listed on the label. This is because wine labeling falls under the authority of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) rather than the FDA. Whatever is in your wine, you are likely to never know about unless the wine is tested.
Dry Farm Wine Guarantee: Mycotoxin/Mold-Free and Additive-Free
Sulfites
Sulfites have antioxidant and antibacterial effects on the wine and kill bacteria to stabilize a wine. The level of sulfites in wine is measured in “PPM, parts per million”. In the US, conventional wines can contain up to 350ppm. Natural winemakers use little or no sulfur, often resulting in less than 40ppm. Sidenote: Dried fruits such as prunes and raisins usually have between 500 ppm up to 2,000 ppm! It is impossible to make a completely sulfite-free wine because wine yeast produce sulfur dioxide (SO2) during the fermentation process.
Important to note, sulfites are not carcinogenic or toxic. They’re more like peanuts. Some people are allergic. These people lack the digestive enzyme sulfite oxidase and therefore can’t metabolize sulfites. If you are allergic, you already know.
Dry Farm Wine Guarantee: Low Sulfites (< 75ppm)
Alcohol Content
Average alcohol content in wine has been rising over the past couple decades. For wines above 14% ABV, the actual alcohol percentage can be 1% greater or lower than stated on the label. For wines at 14% ABV or below, there is a 1.5% variance allowed on the label. US wines average 14-17% ABV.
Dry Farm Wine Guarantee: Low Alcohol (< 12.5%)
Small, Organic, Biodynamic, Dry Farms
Chemical use has grown 26x (2600%) in the last 50 years. Monsanto’s Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in US vineyards today, and it’s been linked to numerous cancer cases worldwide.
Biodiversity strengthens soil bacteria, leading to healthier, polyphenol-rich wines with thoughtful complexity of flavor.
Irrigating grapes results in higher sugar levels at the time of harvest. This leads to higher alcohol levels in wine and other unhealthy high-sugar byproducts in fermentation. Dry farmed wines get their water from natural rainfall. Irrigated vines are dripped water from tubes tied to the plants. Dry farmed plants have roots that grow up to 50 feet deeper than irrigated plants, meaning they absorb more nutrients from deep within the soil. Dry farming also saves 16,000 gallons of water per acre.
Dry Farm Wine Guarantee: All wines come from organic, dry farms with no added pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or other harmful chemicals used.
Less Calories
While I don’t condone counting calories, I know many people like to know this information.
The only source of calories in wine come from alcohol and sugar. Since both sugar and alcohol are lower in Dry Farm Wine, the caloric count is lower. On average, a glass of Dry Farm Wine has 80-90 calories. A commercial glass is roughly 120-150 calories.
How Can I Get Some?
Dry Farm Wines has a delivery service that ships wine to your doorstep for free (only in the US, no shipping to Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Utah, fee for Alaska and Hawaii and no shipping to PO Boxes). You can choose from 6 or 12 bottles, red / white or a variety and opt for monthly or every other month deliveries. They also have occasional supply of rose and bubbles so make sure to get on their email list. You are able to pause, cancel or make adjustments to your subscription at any time, without penalty. They also completely stand behind their wine and if you aren’t satisfied will refund your money or send another bottle to try.
The best part, if you sign up via this link they were so kind to offer my readers an extra bottle of wine for only a penny with their first subscription!
Don’t have any Dry Farm Wines?
I do feel better when I drink Dry Farm Wines, but that is not realistic 100% of the time. Next best choice would be organic wine and then international wine over US conventional wines. Dry Farm Wines specifically recommends French regions like Loire Valley and Jura and believe they have been making wine in a drinkable, clean style for far longer than Americans have.
Psst – check out this article where I dive deeper into organic vs. biodynamic vs. natural wines and compare some top companies.
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