https://pantuso.com/tags/food/ Recent content in Food on Joe Pantuso Hugo en-us Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://pantuso.com/posts/wine-headaches/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://pantuso.com/posts/wine-headaches/ <p>If they think about it at all, people will commonly claim wine headaches come from sulfites. This is almost certainly wrong, and it&rsquo;s been wrong so confidently and for so long that it&rsquo;s become received wisdom. (Dehydration is implicated too, but I think that&rsquo;s not the main case unless you go on an actual bender.)</p> <p>Sulfites are a preservative added to most wine, and they sound like the kind of thing that would cause headaches. The problem with the sulfite theory is empirical: dried apricots contain roughly ten times the sulfite concentration of most red wine, and nobody reports apricot headaches. People with genuine sulfite sensitivity - a real condition, primarily affecting asthmatics — experience respiratory symptoms, not headaches. If sulfites caused wine headaches, white wine (which has higher sulfite content than red) would cause more headaches than red. It doesn&rsquo;t. The pattern is exactly backwards.</p>