We all know how the story goes. You meet your mates at the pub for a drink. You decide on wine because you’re feeling grown up and it’ll last you longer than a beer. You promise yourself you’ll only stay for one (which obviously means three) because you have work tomorrow. Next thing you know, your alarm is going off, the world is spinning, your head is pounding and you’re lying there majorly confuse by how you got so drunk because you only had a couple of wines.
Well, it turns out the surprise hangover might not be all your fault, as it's been discovered that your secret suspicions are true: wine contains more alcohol than manufacturers are actually telling us.
The Telegraph reportedthat almost 100,000 bottles of wine from across the world were tested by academics at the University of California. They found that nearly 60% of the wine they tested was an average of 0.42% higher than it said on the label. Okay, so 0.42 doesn’t sound like THAT much, but when you’re 3 glasses down and wondering why you’re feeling the urge to dance on a table a little earlier than you normally do, that extra percentage could be why.
In all seriousness though, incorrectly labelled bottles is definitely concerning, not only does it make it more difficult to keep track of how much you’ve actually had to drink, it could alter when you're over the limit. Not cool guys.
The study showed that Chilean and Spanish reds, and Chilean and American white wines had some of the biggest differences between the percentage on the bottle and what was actually inside it.
It was also reported that ‘winemakers are entirely aware of the discrepancy They admitted to the researchers that they alter the percentage to meet customers’ expectations of how strong a bottle of alcohol should be’, which to be honest, isn’t particularly comforting.
There seemed to be ‘tendency to overstate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively low actual alcohol, and a tendency to understate the alcohol content for wine that has relatively high alcohol content’. I know, it's pretty bad and quite confusing. But I’ll admit, it’s a tiny bit reassuring from the surprise ‘what the went wrong!?’ hangover side of things.
Don’t panic, we’re not saying that you need to step away from the wine, we’re not monsters. But we might just be a little bit more wary when we’re reaching for that second glass (bottle).
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.