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The heart-healthy wine story rested on a molecule present in a glass at one-hundredth of the studied dose.

In 2001, 27 percent of Americans called moderate drinking bad for health. By 2026, half did.

Beliefs that grant permission get less scrutiny than beliefs that demand sacrifice.

I keep the corks. Douro, Montalcino, Etna, a dozen others in a kitchen drawer with the twine and the batteries. My wife thinks the drawer is ridiculous. The drawer is a record of about 15 years of choosing where to go based on what grows there.

I'm also a physician who studies substance use, which means I spent those same 15 years reading the alcohol literature. I watched the heart-healthy wine story fall apart in slow motion, and I kept buying wine the entire time. The interesting part is not the science. The interesting part is the lag.

The story I inherited

In 1992, two French researchers published a paper in The Lancet naming the French Paradox: relatively low coronary disease in a country eating plenty of saturated fat. They pointed at wine. Morley Safer had already carried the idea into American living rooms on 60 Minutes in November 1991, and red wine sales in the United States rose 39 percent the following year. If you were an adult in the 1990s, you absorbed this whether or not you ever read a study.

The mechanism arrived next. Resveratrol, a compound in grape skins, got credited with the effect and became one of the most studied molecules in nutrition. The arithmetic never worked. A glass of red delivers less than two milligrams of resveratrol. Trials showing any effect used 100 to 500 milligrams a day. One dose-response analysis calculated you'd need roughly 111 glasses daily to reach the level studied for cancer prevention.

The founding laboratory........

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