White wine health benefits boost
Updated on 22 June 2008
A white wine with the same health benefits as red has been developed by scientists.
The wine, from Israel, has boosted levels of plant chemicals which are thought to combat heart disease.
Red wine is naturally fortified with the polyphenol compounds, which are concentrated in grape skins. Fermenting the skins of grapes along with their juice gives red wine its colour, and antioxidant properties.
White wine is not made with grape skins and therefore lacks health-giving polyphenols.
But researchers at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology, have developed a way to boost white wine polyphenols six-fold.
The technique involves incubating squeezed grapes in the presence of alcohol for 18 hours before removing their skins.
The polyphenol-charged wine looks and tastes the same as regular white wine but has the same antioxidant activity as red wine.
Israeli wine manufacturer Binyamina has now started using the recipe to manufacture the healthier white wine. It is expected to be on sale in the US by the end of the year.
Professor Michael Aviram, a researcher at Technion's Faculty of Medicine, said: "By using wine-derived alcohol we were able to extract the grape polyphenols very rapidly during white wine preparation.
"There has been an incredible response from those that have heard about the research with many thinking of taking up drinking white wine more seriously!"
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