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Although excessive alcohol consumption has adverse health effects, epidemiological studies have consistently demonstrated that moderate consumption of alcohol and wine is statistically associated with a decrease in cardiovascular illness such as heart failure. Additional news reports on the French paradox also back the relationship. This paradox concerns the comparatively low incidence of coronary heart disease in France despite relatively high levels of saturated fat in the traditional French diet. Some epidemiologists suspect that this difference is due to the higher consumption of wines by the French, but the scientific evidence for this theory is limited. Because the average moderate wine drinker is likely to exercise more often, to be more health conscious, and to be from a higher educational and socioeconomic background, the association between moderate wine drinking and better health may be related to confounding factors or represent a correlation rather than cause and effect.

Population studies have observed a J-curve association between wine consumption and the risk of heart disease: heavy drinkers have an elevated risk, while moderate drinkers (up to 20g of alcohol per day, approximately 200 ml (7 imp fl oz; 7 US fl oz) of 12.7% ABV wine) have a lower risk than non-drinkers. Studies have also found that moderate consumption of other alcoholic beverages may be cardioprotective, although the association is considerably stronger for wine. Additionally, some studies have found greater health benefits for red than white wine, though other studies have found no difference. Red wine contains more polyphenols than white wine, and these are thought to be particularly protective against cardiovascular disease.

vineyard

A chemical in red wine called resveratrol has been shown to have both cardioprotective and chemoprotective effects in animal studies. Low doses of resveratrol in the diet of middle-aged mice has a widespread influence on the genetic factors related to aging and may confer special protection on the heart. Specifically, low doses of resveratrol mimic the effects of caloric restriction—diets with 20–30% fewer calories than a typical diet. Resveratrol is produced naturally by grape skins in response to fungal infection, including exposure to yeast during fermentation. As white wine has minimal contact with grape skins during this process, it generally contains lower levels of the chemical. Beneficial compounds in wine also include other polyphenols, antioxidants, and flavonoids.

To benefit fully from resveratrol in wine, it is recommended to sip slowly when drinking. Due to inactivation in the gut and liver, most of the resveratrol consumed while drinking red wine does not reach the blood circulation. However, when sipping slowly, absorption via the mucous membranes in the mouth can result in up to 100 times the blood levels of resveratrol.

Source: Wikipedia

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What better way to enjoy your wine than with a playlist of wine songs? That’s rhetorical, don’t answer. But it’s true, people love wine and people love songs, so listening to songs about wine while drinking wine is a no-brainer.

From the melancholy “Wine Colored Roses” — nobody does melancholy like George Jones — to the sweet nostalgia of Matraca Berg’s “Strawberry Wine,” here are some of our favorite celebrations of wine through song.

And if “Sangria Wine,” by Jerry Jeff Walker, doesn’t make you want to shake a leg, keep drinking.

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Sometimes I write things that resonate familiar, though I know not from whence they were inspired. Experience? I hope not. Wine? Perhaps. Worry not about my style, henceforth I shall only write in thy mother’s English.

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Milltowns by Mark Erelli

For his latest release, Milltowns, Mark Erelli covered several Bill Morrissey songs. The whole thing is worth checking out, but “These Cold Fingers” gets me, especially this last verse:

The dog can’t move no more
Surprised he made it till the spring
His pain won’t go away
And the pills don’t do a thing
You’ve known that old hound longer
Than you’ve known any of your friends
And no matter how you let him down
He’ll always take you back again
So it’s one tall glass of whiskey
One last drink for old times’ sake
The dog just lays in bed
And watches every move you make
Wrap him in his blanket
Hold him once more close to you
Lead him out behind the barn
With a borrowed .22

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This book started with a conversation over drinks in the bar of a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. I was talking to Ellis Amburn, editor at a major publishing house. I had known Ellis well in Fort Worth. We had many of the same friends at TCU. Not only was he an editor, but he wrote best-selling biographies of movie stars.

I began telling Ellis that I wanted to write a novel about the great Comanche raid that reached the Gulf of Mexico and then turned north to attack the new capital city of Austin but was stopped at the Battle of Plum Creek. I talked about white women being taken prisoner and made into wives or slaves by warriors. He got interested. He asked questions.

At the end of the lunch Ellis said he wanted to publish the novel. We shook hands. He wrote two words on a napkin that he stuck in his pocket: COMANCHE SEX.

I was paid the first half of a large advance. I began researching and writing bits of the book. Then life got in the way. I got a divorce. I quit Sports Illustrated. I wrote a movie about vampire bats. But finally I was ready to concentrate on the novel.

I left my house and cat and dog in Austin in the care of frinds and leased an apartment for a year in the Royalty Coin Company building in San Antonio. It is a cylindrical stone building on the River Walk at the Commerce Street Bridge. Margaret Cousins, who had been my editor at Doubleday, had retired to her hometown of San Antonio, where she owned an apartment in the same building. Her friend Billy Baldwin, the New York interior decorator, was there also. My apartment on the third floor had bay windows that opened onto the river. I could practically see the Alamo. There were bars and restaurants up and down the sidealk directly below me. Boats cruised the narrow river with Mexican bands playing aboard. Surely this was the perfect place to write “Plum Creek.”

Pete Gent was helping me move in. The phone began ringing as we stood in the hall with armloads of boxes. I didn’t think anyone knew my new number. I unlocked the door and answered the phone and it was Jim Wiatt telling me I was to have breakfast tomorrow at the Beverly Wilshire with Steve McQueen, who had just finished reading Blessed McGill and wanted me to work on the screenplay “Tom Horn” that had been written by Tom McGuane.
Pete took me to the airport in San Antonio that night and I didn’t come back to the apartment for three months.

Eventually I set up my portable typewriter–the faithful little Skywriter had been retired by the movie business, which requires a lot of spaciing–on the kitchen table of the apartment and got back to work on “Plum Creek.” I discovered there is a drawback to living on the River Walkk. It is a loud party all night long. Bongo Joe thumps his oil drums in the middle of the night. Drunk soldiers are shouting at hookers. There are noisy fistfights. It is sort of like living on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village.

By this time Ellis Amburn had left his editing job and moved to Key West to write movie star biographies full-time. At about page 300 of “Plum Creek” I sent the manuscript off to the new editor in New York, hoping to collect another piece of the advance. She said, in effect, what the hell is this? Is this Giles Got Boy Goes West? She said nobody wants to read a novel about Texas. She said forget about the rest of the advance.

I went back to Los Angeles to write a script about Belle Starr. I stopped by Bill Wittliff’s office at the old Encino Press building in Austin and gave him a cardboard box that contain the “Plum Creek” manuscript. He had encouraged me to write it in the beginning, so I wound up giving it to him. I told Bill to dispose of it as he wished, I was finished with it.

For the next 15 years Bill would now and then say,” I’ve still got the ‘Plum Creek’ manuscript. You should finish it.” I always said this was as far as I could take it.

In 1996, Dan and June Jenkins took a house for the summer on a beautiful golf course in the moutains of North Carolina. I went up and spent a couple of weeks with them. Dan and I played golf most days. It was a magical place. A river flowed past our door between our screen-in porch and the thirteenth green. There was a Cherokee museum with a rebuilt village a few miles away. As I was walking through the Cherokee village one day, something hit me.

I rushed back to the house and opened my laptop and started writing “Plum Creek” all over again.

This occupied me for the next two years. Under the title The Borderland, the book was published in 2000, roughly 20 years after Ellis Amburn wrote those two words on a napkin.

The portrait of Sam Houston in this chapter may be a little overwrought, but it is the great man the way I saw him from reading his speeches and letters and many books about him. As a character in a novel, old Sam cannot help outshining everyone around him.

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Mathew (Old Paint) Caldwell was born in Kentucky about 1798 and is said to have acquired the nickname because of white spots in his hair, beard and on his breast like a paint horse. According to Kemp in The Signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Caldwell is thought, like the Burkett, Zumwalts, Kents and DeWitts, to have come from Missouri. Baker in Texas Scrapbook says he came from Tennessee. Other records indicate that Caldwell and his family were part of the party who came to the colony as part of the Tennessee-Texas Land Company. Land records indicate that Caldwell arrived in the DeWitt Colony with a family of 5 on 20 Feb 1831. He received title to a sitio of land on 22 Jun 1831 southwest of current Hallettsville in Lavaca County near the Zumwalt Settlement. In Gonzales Caldwell acquired the original James Hinds residence on Water St. across from the Guadalupe River south of the Dickinson and Kimble Hat Factory. Dixon in The Men Who Made Texas states that Caldwell was born 8 Mar 1798, moved with his parents to Missouri in 1818, became a skilled Indian fighter in Missouri and was involved in trading with local Indians in the territory. Dixon further states he came to Texas from Missouri via Natchitoches by horseback in 1833 and first settled in current Sabine County where he was elected along with Stephen Blount and Martin Parmer to represent the area at the Independence Convention of 1836. Election returns in Gonzales County show Caldwell and John Fisher were elected delegates from that municipality for the convention. On 2 Mar, Caldwell along with William C. Crawford and William D. Lacy were appointed by the President to procure couriers to send expresses to the army “Believing it of vital importance that this convention know correctly the true situation of our enemy on the frontier, and also the condition of our army, they would recommend the convention to accept the services of Major Caldwell, who purposes to start this day to the frontier.”

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Edwin A. “Bud” Shrake, Jr. was an American journalist, sportswriter, novelist, biographer and screenwriter. He co-wrote a series of golfing advice books with legendary golf coach Harvey Penick, including Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, a golf guide that became the best-selling sports book in publishing history. Called a “lion of Texas letters” by the Austin American-Statesman, Shrake was a member of the Texas Film Hall of Fame, and received the Lon Tinkle lifetime achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters[2] and the Texas Book Festival Bookend Award.

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Austin writer Bud Shrake passed away earlier this year. Shrake taped an episode of Texas Monthly Talks in January 2008 during which time host Evan Smith said “If the assemblage of undeniably talented outlaws, renegades, malcontents, and misfits who emerged from the iron triangle of Paschal High School, Texas Christian University, and the Metroplex newspaper business amounts to a Fort Worth mafia, this week’s guest is surely the don: the most talented outlaw, renegade, malcontent, and misfit of the bunch — the one with the longest life in the world of writing at various levels and in various media, and the one whose work, more than that of any other, continues to surprise and delight.” Read more of Smith’s comments on Shrake here or watch the complete interview: