The Case for Wine in an Age of Longevity and Optimization

Why Drink Wine?

I recently had the pleasure of tasting a 1912 D’Oliveiras Verdelho Madeira. Younger examples are pale brown and translucent; this one, darkened by age and enriched by long evaporative aging, was almost opaque. Youthful flavors of pear and candied citrus had deepened into tamarind, dried orange peel, and nutmeg.

What struck me most was the awareness that the hands that harvested these grapes and made this wine are long gone. Perhaps the vineyards themselves have since disappeared, replaced by bananas or seaside condominiums. Over more than one hundred years of this wine’s existence, Portugal has endured two world wars, colonial conflict and independence, the fall of one republic, the rise of another, and now life within a thriving European Union. Its large barrel quietly persisted through decades so that, for a brief moment, I could enter its history by tasting and bearing witness.

That experience sharpened a question I’ve been wrestling with for several years: what place, if any, does wine still hold in a culture increasingly oriented around health optimization and risk reduction?

Health

In recent years, my relationship with alcohol has changed. Pregnancy during the pandemic—and again three years later—largely put drinking on pause for me. More recently, even two glasses of wine at dinner are enough to disrupt my sleep, leaving me awake and staring at the clock at 2:30 a.m. These changes, I’ve come to realize, are not mine alone.

The broader culture, too, feels as though it is turning against alcohol. In 2025, the World Health Organization took a hardline stance, asserting that no amount of alcohol is safe for consumption and classified it as a Group 1 Carcinogen, like tobacco, asbestos, and radiation. Canada followed suit, revising guidelines that dramatically lowered recommended intake, suggesting that even moderate drinking carries a measurable risk of cancer. At the same time, the rise of no- and low-alcohol alternatives has been swift. Mainstream retailers like Safeway now devote entire shelves to them, normalizing abstention not as deprivation, but as choice.

This shift fits neatly within the ethos of what’s often called Medicine 3.0: a focus on prevention, optimization, and healthspan. In this framework, sleep quality, metabolic health, and long-term cognitive performance are prioritized. Alcohol—once defended for its cardiovascular benefits—has become increasingly difficult to justify. The cultural narrative has moved from indulgence to optimization, from pleasure to performance.

Yet, nearly every behavior in modern life carries quantifiable risk. Eating too much red meat, eating too many eggs, driving, breathing, falling—we assign probabilities, model outcomes, and reduce complex human lives to charts and thresholds. What we are far less practiced at measuring are the counterweights: beauty, community, the quiet pleasure of shared rituals, or the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself. We rarely ask how to quantify belonging— until recently.

Belonging

Modern longevity research makes clear—particularly the work emerging from the Blue Zones— that the benefits often attributed to wine, diet, or individual habits may in fact belong to something more elemental: community. Across these regions of exceptional longevity, people are embedded in daily rhythms of togetherness—shared meals, multigenerational households, familiar faces encountered again and again.

Strong social ties are associated with dramatically lower mortality risk, while isolation carries dangers comparable to smoking or obesity. Belonging reduces stress, supports sleep and immune function, and quietly reinforces healthier behavior over decades. In this light, what looks like a glass raised for pleasure or tradition may matter less than the act of raising it with others—the enduring human connection doing much of the work we once credited to what was in the glass.

Beauty

Wine has an uncanny ability to reflect the essence of a time and place. No other agricultural product offers such a vivid snapshot of a year—one understood not just intellectually but sensorially. And it isn’t only the beauty of flavor. Wine carries the physical beauty of where it comes from: the slope of a hillside, the glare of afternoon sun, the wind off the sea, the stillness of a valley at dusk. To drink a wine made with a reverence to this, is to glimpse a landscape you may never visit—a kind of geography you can hold in your hands.

Last year, at a portfolio tasting for the importer Kermit Lynch, this idea crystallized. Each producer, each wine, clearly reflected where it came from—not just in flavor, but in body, balance, and intention. The differences weren’t theatrical; they were specific and observable. Tasted side by side, that sense of place felt unmistakably real.

At a separate unveiling of the Bordeaux 2023 vintage, I reached a similar conclusion. From a sampling across communes, the character of a tough year revealed itself plainly, without artifice. This, to me, is the transparency authentic wines should offer.

Authentic Wine

What I call authentic wine goes by many names today—natural, minimalist, non-intervention, artisanal. In the nineteenth century, it was simply called wine: a product made with minimal processing, then aged—or drunk—so that its raw materials could speak with as little interpretation as possible.

What does that mean in practice, not marketing language? When done well, a Cabernet Sauvignon reveals kinship with its counterparts grown in distant places while still expressing the climatic and cultural distinctions of where it was made. It is both familiar and nuanced at once—a way of traveling without leaving home, safely ensconced in a well-worn armchair.

This is the category of wine I aim to expose. These are the producers I want to seek out—traveling widely to share their work for our collective benefit. For now, I won’t get bogged down in definitions; ideally, one will begin to coalesce as we go.

Why Drink Wine?

Wine does not create joy on its own, but it gives joy a shape. It turns events into memories, marks transitions, and connects the present moment to history. What would a celebration be without wine to christen it? Wine has long served to pause time—a shared acknowledgment that this moment matters. It slows us, brings us to the table, asks us to look at one another, and stay a little longer. Historically, it helped ritualize peace by creating mutual vulnerability, reciprocity, and obligation. To share a drink was to enter a temporary protected space; to violate it was sacrilegious.

You can live a full, meaningful life without wine. But wine, at its best, reminds us that meaning is not only measured in outcomes and optimizations. It lives in moments shared, in places remembered, in peace offerings briefly held. A well-made glass doesn’t ask for excess—only presence. In a culture increasingly starved of real, physical togetherness, that shared presence—the simple act of sitting, drinking, sharing something made by human hands together—feels quietly radical.