While books about wine and champagne abound, this particular work by Dr. Tran Ky and Dr. Drouard addresses a somewhat more unusual and specific aspect of the beverage, not as a mood-enhancing tipple but as a remedy or healing potion. "Le Vin Medecin", champagne as doctor. A recurring theme ever since wine was invented and history recorded, but somehow better explored by the French, as befits the living embodiments and proponents of the art of the paradox.
     As with any human production and undertaking, wine, like Aesop's fabled tongue, can lead to the best and the worst.
    With the birth of alcoholism in the 19th century, before it was called less threateningly, intemperance, the French authorities have now swung the pendulum the other way and in a bout of repressive and exacerbated puritanism are proposing to burn what was previously adored by ushering the same opprobrium upon wine as is cast on tobacco in England and the United States.

     In England, meanwhile, "binge drinking", the suicidal annihilation of the senses, is reaching epidemic proportions. Excess seems to be a sad trait of human nature but amplified by globalisation, mass culture and a curious phenomenon of bad behaviour resonance. .
     To our knowledge, champagne, the universal symbol of joy and celebration has rarely been linked or associated with drunkenness. A "feminine", soothing drink, as some are fond of qualifying it, always seems to bring out the best in us. This book examines how it can also put the best back in us.
      Dr. Tran Ky and Dr. Drouard review the science of this wonderful mechanism, this quasi-alchemic process, whereby the many and multiple beneficial active molecules of a good champagne interact at the most basic cellular level with our affected organs to remedy the ailments which afflict all of us occasionally.
     Paradox supreme and highly counter-intuitive, who would have thought that a sip of champagne and its pearly bubbles, cures all windy manifestations: burping, hiccups and flatulence. But there you are! Who knows that a glass of "champers", judiciously timed, will enhance your libido better than any pill while preserving the romance.
     "Half a bottle of champagne is worth half of Harley Street", noted the astute observer. So we are delighted to let the genie out of the bottle for the benefit of our English-speaking readers.
     The other message and the leitmotif of our good doctors is that the therapeutic effect of champagne only works in moderation. As in homeopathy, the potency of the remedy is inversely correlated to its dilution. Less is more!
     The healing unit of measure, the flute, the enchanted flute, to put the sparkle back in your eye, is one and one only, and not a drop more; per meal, that is. That is the prescription; what puts "mens sana in corpore sano", the healthy mind in the healthy body. Go beyond and enter not in totally uncharted waters, but operate then in a different mode without the blessing of medical authority. Even the formidable Sir Winston Churchill, who "took more out of alcohol than alcohol took out of him" bowed to the iron law of diminishing returns: "A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration… A bottle produces the opposite."
     This is also the time and place to tip our hats and raise our glasses and make a libation to the English, the Frenchman’s best enemy, without whom champagne would never be what it is today. To them we owe the toast, the cork, the bottle, the corkscrew and last but not least, champagne brut, dry or extra-dry, to match their wit.
     As the second biggest consumers of the nectar, after the French, we will be eternally ‘grapeful’ to them.

Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers et… a votre santé. . ORDER THE BOOK