Personal

Wine and Health – Part I

Wine and health has been pretty well documented recently with the industry starting to realise the long term potential issues surrounding the lifestyle of a wine professional. As a relative newcomer and someone still in his late 20’s, I can’t speak for the long term effects of anything but I have noticed some short term effects over the last 6 months, notably weight gain. Now, this isn’t an inevitable part of working within the wine industry but the last 18 months of my life have been largely spent studying for various exams, working with few breaks and more recently becoming a father, most of which isn’t conducive to physical fitness. The birth of my son in particular seems to have tipped the balance somewhat, resulting in something like a 4-5kg gain over the past couple of months and sending out a signal that I should probably tackle the issue before it becomes a problem.

So, I will! I’ve got 6 months until the final exam of the WSET Diploma and that’s going to require a few things:

  1. A lot of studying. For me that means a lot of sitting down and poring over textbooks, maps and articles until my head hurts. I do supplement this with a daily walk of around an hour whilst listening to Levi Dalton’s podcasts, but the rest is hunch-back time and this can be up to 3 hours a day.

  2. A lot of tasting. I still try to get to Monvinic on a weekly or bi-monthly basis to do blind tasting, but there’s a lot of wines that I prefer to purchase a bottle of and get to know over a day or three. I would say my monthly consumption of wine is somewhere in the 10-15 bottles range, and this isn’t likely to go down anytime soon!

  3. A lot of energy. With the large commitments to studying and tasting on top of working and my new found friend, sleep deprivation, energy is vital. Being in good shape is a pretty solid approach to having more energy and it makes a big difference when the going gets tough.

Now I’ve always kept myself in some sort of reasonable shape by going on occasional jogs and supplementing that with press-ups, bodyweight squats and other various calisthenics. It’s been over 2 years since I’ve set foot in a gym but I need a bit of extra firepower for this, so I’ve signed up for a 2 month trial at Anytime Fitness, a franchise of which is conveniently around 100m away from where I live. The idea is to get into a rhythm of exercise that allows me to continue tasting and drinking as I learn my way around the wine world without compromising my health at the same time.

Ideally, I’d like this to become a sort of monthly update to show that it is possible to be heavily invested into the wine industry whilst still being physically fit and healthy. It’s about 3 and a half weeks until the beginning of August, when I tend to drink a little less anyway due to the heat and stifling humidity of Barcelona, so I’ll probably wait until the beginning of September to post the first update. That gives me 8 weeks to get the ball rolling and have some results to show for it. Off we go!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.