Conventional wisdom has always said that drinking beer and moving on to wine is a mistake as the consequential hangover will be a doozy. It's never been clear as to the quantities involved that cause these dire consequences but the threat was always there.
Worse still was moving from wine to grain based spirits (although in my experience wine based spirits like Cognac can also produce unwelcome results.).
No-one knows the origin of this 'conventional wisdom' and it's been dumped amongst all those other old wives' tales like:
- Chocolate causes acne
- Cracking knuckles leads to arthritis
- Shaving causes hair to grow thicker
- Double bass playing leads to madness*
- Feed a fever, starve a cold
etc.
The medical profession is no help in this either as they say that while there is no correlation between mixing drinks and the severity of hangover the different alcoholic percentages between beer, wine and spirits can lead to the drinker underestimating the strength of the higher alcoholic strength drink after drinking the lesser alcoholic one. Translation - it's the quantity of alcohol that causes the drunkenness and subsequent hangover, not the type of drink.
OK.
But ...... on St Patrick's Day last week I went up to the local club which I'm a member of ( it's a nice community club along the lines of a Cosi club or RSA with pretentions to being a 'Gentleman's' club even though you can wear shorts and a T-shirt). I had a Guinness and a Kilkenny (beers) to celebrate old Pat's special day. These drinks were about 4.5% alcohol and about 330 ml each equivalent to about a glass and a half of wine at 14% alcohol. I went home and drank two glasses of chardonnay making the total equivalent less than a bottle of wine.
The next day I felt like shit.
This last Easter weekend we had 3 friends to stay who arrived separately on Friday and left separately on Tuesday. Through the 4 days we consumed copious amounts of wine from Rieussec Sauternes and Coleraine red through outstanding chardonnays and pinot noirs through to Champagne, Deutz rose and some simple pinot gris, cabernets and chardonnays. Between the five of us we drank about 20 bottles!
That was about a bottle each per night. I felt fine each morning - good enough to swim, bush walk, do gardening and enjoy (non religious) the Easter weekend.
So.
About that old wives' tale? It might just be true about the danger of mixing the grape with the grain.
I'll have to keep an eye out for hairy palms!
* Not certain that this one isn't true.
