Unlock the fountain of youth? New study suggests rare red wine can make skin look younger

A new study claims that a special and rare type of red wine can make a person’s skin look younger.

Researchers at the University of Florida discovered that women who drank two glasses of alcohol-free muscadine wine every day had more elasticity and water retention in their skin than those who drank a placebo.

“We used dealcoholized muscadine wine because we were interested in the effect of the bioactive compounds in wine, specifically the polyphenols, on skin health,” said Lindsey Christman, Ph.D., who did the research with Liwei Gu, Ph.D., professor of food chemistry at UF, in a media release.

Elasticity is what helps the skin stay firm and prevent sagging as people age, while water retention helps to protect the skin from damage.

The study is the first to test how alcohol-free wine consumption can affect skin health in a randomized clinical trial. Scientists recruited 17 women between the ages of 40 and 67 and randomly gave them either two glasses daily of dealcoholized muscadine wine or a placebo drink that looked and tasted similar.

The muscadine grape is native to the Southeast and is often used to make wine, but it’s also known as a “super fruit” because of its high levels of polyphenols — such as anthocyanins, quercetin, and ellagic acid — which can help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress.

“Muscadine grapes have been found to have a unique polyphenolic profile in comparison to other red wine varieties,” Christman said.The placebo drink did not contain polyphenols.

Participants drank two glasses of the drink they were given every day for six weeks, then took a two-week break before switching to the other drink for another six weeks.

Skin conditions and markers of inflammation and oxidative stress were measured at the beginning of the study and at the end of each six-week period.

Researchers found that muscadine wine improved skin elasticity and reduced water loss on the surface. “Our study suggests that muscadine wine polyphenols have the potential to improve skin conditions, specifically elasticity and transepidermal water loss, in middle-aged and older women,” Christman said.

However, they did not find any significant effect on the number of wrinkles on the skin after the study.

And while there were improvements to skin smoothness and lower levels of inflammation and oxidative stress for the muscadine-drinking group, the difference from the placebo group was not significant in those factors.

“This crossover study showed that six weeks of dealcoholized muscadine wine consumption resulted in improvement of certain skin parameters associated with aging, such as elasticity on the forearm and barrier function of the skin on the face when compared to baseline and placebo,” Christman explained. “This is likely due to decreases in inflammation and oxidative stress.” The results of the study were presented Monday in Boston at Nutrition 2023, an annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition.

Researchers think that doing the study again with a bigger and more diverse group of people would be useful to help confirm the findings. They also cautioned that drinking wine that does have alcohol — such as muscadine — might not have the same effect, with Christman also saying that “the dealcoholization process may alter the chemical composition.”