The Day After
Why See-Dub, what are you doing up at this hour on a day off? Drinking coffee and blogging. The missus is out shopping right now--if you can believe that--having received a coupon for her favorite crafty-project store for something like fifty percent off between the hours of 6AM and 9AM.
It's what the economists call a "sorting equilibrium" for type A personalities.
I am also trying to figure out why my jaws start to hurt when I drink red wine. A family member knowledgable about such things brought over an outstanding bottle of Bordeaux which we enjoyed with our delicious Thanksgiving dinner. And on my second glass it started to feel like--imagine you're using a stethoscope, okay? With the little hard ends that go way down in your ears. And now imagine the patient you're using that on suddenly pops the end of the stethoscope with a cattle prod, causing your eustachian tubes, tonsils, and the back of your jaw to sing out "Don't tase me, bro!" with every single new sip. Slurp--one second--bzzt!
It took me a long time to finish that glass. Hey, it was good.
There's a lot out there on google about people who get "red wine headaches", but this doesn't feel like an ordinary sinus headache or even a migraine (and certainly not a hangover). And it's not a traditional allergic reaction--I don't turn red or need a Kleenex or anything. Curiously, not all kinds of red wine do this to me, either. This was just the worst case I'd ever had of it. I'm thinking it's a tannin reaction or something, which would explain why a nice hearty bordeaux would do that.
Anyway, enough health whining--if you have heard of anything similar, please tell me so in the comments. My early AM googlage unearthed an interesting digression on organic wine from a winemaker:
As an aside: "organic" wine -- I don't get the attraction. I know I can grow a better wine grape organically, and be more responsible to my neighbors and our descendents as a consequence. But nobody can make a better wine, nor lessen the impact of winemaking on the environment, by doing it "organically". In fact, since organic producers can't add sulfur dioxide to their musts or juices to inhibit spoilage, their wines are always at risk for having a higher congener content, as well as higher contents of biogenic amines (more on these below)....
Even if you don't get migraines, these biogenic amines create a physiological effect that may increase the unpleasantness of your headache. And stressed yeast (see my earlier post) pump out more biogenic amines. Your high-alcohol, native-fermented, "organic" wine is probably loaded with them.