How come red wine gives you a headache?

If you look too deeply into the glass, you sometimes have a headache the next day. That hangover is mainly it due to dehydration. Alcohol is a diuretic, so if you drink too much, you also urinate too much. A few glasses of water before bed can prevent a lot of suffering (or fewer glasses of wine, of course). But there are also people who get a headache after just half an hour from just one glass of red wine. What’s up with that?

Sulphites are a common culprit. Sulfite is a sulfur salt that is added to almost all wines (including white) to increase their shelf life. It is also found in small amounts in the skin of grapes – and in garlic, leeks and onions. It is also found in many processed foods, such as sausage, chips and dried fruit. People never associate them with headaches. And rightly so, experts said earlier NRC: Although there are people who are allergic to sulphite, they often get a skin rash and breathing problems. No headache.

Tastings and courses

This is also what wine connoisseur Ronald de Groot says. He trained as a doctor, but 25 years ago he hung up his stethoscope to start a wine magazine: Press wine. This has now become a large platform that also organizes tastings and courses. “Sulphite does not explain the headache,” De Groot summarizes. “And the same applies to histamines, which are also often mentioned.” You can also find these in many other foods, for example in fish and spinach. And people who are hypersensitive to histamines do not specifically get headaches, but rather intestinal and skin complaints.

Then you have tyramine and tannins. De Groot also waves that away. But he also says: “Wine is a bit of a complicated matter. It contains so many substances that have an effect on the body – sometimes in certain combinations. We don’t know everything about it yet.”

That’s why he is pleasantly surprised a new study which appeared at the end of November in Scientific Reports. This study points to quercetin, a so-called flavonol, as a headache trigger. Quercetin is a strong antioxidant (a substance that neutralizes harmful, reactive oxygen particles) to which many health effects are attributed. You can find the substance in red fruit, citrus fruit and broccoli. And a lot of grapes.

Lesser known brother

But quercetin now appears to inhibit an enzyme that is important for breaking down alcohol: aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH). This is a lesser known brother of alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), from the same degradation reaction.

“The bottom line is that an intermediate product of alcohol breakdown continues to circulate in your blood,” says De Groot. “Namely acetaldehyde. That is the substance that causes complaints: nausea, sweating. And therefore a headache.” You see the same problem among relatively many people in Asia, he notes. In them, the gene that codes for the enzyme ADH is less active, or even absent, making them less able to tolerate alcohol – or even not at all. There are also individual differences among them, De Groot knows. That also explains why not everyone gets red wine headaches.

Taking a pill with ALDH will not help much. Our intestines break down the enzyme before it is absorbed. What you can do: find out which wines won’t give you a headache. The concentration of flavonols in red wine varies considerably.

Red wines that contain no flavonols at all do not exist, according to De Groot. And that’s a good thing: “They also give a certain taste, a certain character to the wine.”

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