Wanted: A Wine, Pro-Biotic Experiment

Given that, in nature, one would generally not find the presence of alcohol without also finding various little organisms that produce alcohol, I think it may be likely that the number of live organisms in one's alcoholic beverage of choice would have an effect on overall drinking rates. Thomas Jefferson, if I remember correctly, actually suggested wine as a way to curb alcoholism. Obviously, the distilled alcohols have no organisms in them, and now even wines are probably dead; it is common practice to add a lot of sulfite to wine. Now, the biggest problem, perhaps, is that wines are going to taste different, so whoever participates in a test will know the wines are different, but they need not know why. One could run a short term experiment, consisting of two casks of wines, one largely organism free and one with live cultures- you'd probably want the same participants but two different events- college students would love two free parties. As long as consumption can be properly monitored, researchers ought to be able to note whether or not live cultures have an influence on alcohol intake. I suspect there would be need for further refinement- more elegant, long term research. One could possibly argue that our modern, 'dead' beverages encourage a behavior of over-drinking or binging, and that it would take a while for the re-introduction of live cultures to effect drinking behavior.