Red Wine Headaches Project

Red wine triggers mild to serious headaches for some wine drinkers, but the cause is not known. An internet search will provide a number of speculative ideas: sulfites, histamines, tannins, alcohol, sugar and other wild guesses. Most of these have been ruled out, but red wine contains much more tannin and related compounds, so these possibilities should be carefully researched. Our research will compare a list of wines that cause, and those that do not cause, headaches, according to patients who suffer from this affliction, and chemically analyze those wines. We will then compare the inventory of substances in those that trigger headaches and those that do not. We hope that we will be able to identify the culprits from that comparison.

Your support today will help us tackle this issue. We have combined forces from three leaders: wine chemistry, metabolome analysis and diagnosis of headaches for this project. If anyone has a chance to sort this out, it is our excellent team in UC Davis Viticulture and Enology.