This is just my little theory that I have utterly no basis for. It is in the same category as my belief that Ximanavro is genetically related to Sagrantino, I'm just skating on instinct.
Two years ago I was having dinner with a publicist I know in Los Angeles. She passed the wine list to me and said, "It seems I have a problem with red wine."
I was mulling over our choices in red Burgundy. I was not happy to hear this.
"What kind of allergy?" I asked.
She looked around because she was known in this place. She lowered her voice. she didn't establish eye contact and said, "It makes me smell. It makes my skin smell."
I wondered for a second if she had that psychological syndrome where you believe yourself to stink but no one else can smell it? But then she followed it up with, "My husband complains about it. He refuses to sleep with me, so I've been only drinking white lately."
I thought about this and gave my diagnosis which, I had no medical basis for.
I proposed that she might be allergic to added tannins--those nasty ones so common in modern wines. The tannins are added because some winemakers are obsessed with pumping up their color and believe this can do this or cure sunburnt grapes and also adjust mouthfeel. The tannins available are grape, oak and chestnut. This woman had some of those clients and drank mostly Californian and Australia wines. I ordered a bottle of Genetet Pansiot Gevrey and asked her to call me in the morning if her husband complained. I was the writer and she could blame me, so we ordered the wine.
There was no problem. She was really happy about the outcome. Red wine was hers again, (as long as she didn't have to drink her client's)
Then, I was talking to my friend Dr. Parzen who told me that his uncle's wife complained that red wine made her 'poop.' It seems to have given her the runs. The runs?
This was news to me.
They're both news to me.
Then I heard someone say that new oak gives them the runs as well. If we're to believe this all fingers do point to additive tannins as an allergy source.
Any scientists out there?

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