The Red Wine That Could Help You Fight COVID-19, Study Shows

It’s possible that the Tannins in red wine, and tea, could inhibit COVID-19. A prominent cancer researcher in Taiwan is investigating the theory right now.

Dr. Mien-Chie Hung is president of China Medical University in Taiwan. He spent 40 years in the US and for many years was chair of the department of molecular and cellular oncology at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston before moving home to Taiwan in 2019.

His theory is based on Taiwanese research from 2003 into SARS, which like COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus. SARS appeared in China in 2002 and killed 774 people in 11 countries before disappearing. There has not been a case of SARS reported since 2004, although a team at a different Houston research hospital developed a prototype vaccine in 2016 in the event of a re-emergence. That vaccine has never been tested.

“SARS occurred about a half year, and then totally disappeared,” Hung told Wine-Searcher. “All the research stopped. Nobody wanted to do it anymore. We thought tannin might have some impact on SARS but the research is incomplete.”

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Hung said that the Taiwanese lab showed that pure Tannic acid can inhibit two enzymes critical to SARS that are also critical to COVID-19.

First, Tannic acid was shown to have the ability to inhibit the main protease of SARS, which is also the main protease of COVID-19. Proteases are enzymes that perform necessary biological functions in many organisms; protease inhibitors are how AIDS drugs work.

Second, Tannic acid also inhibits an important enzyme in human cells, TMP RSS2. This enzyme is on the surface of human cells. When a human is infected by a coronavirus, the virus recognizes TMP RSS2 on the cell surface and clips it with its spike protein. Several research projects are looking into inhibiting TMP RSS2 and one inhibitor of it has already been approved for clinical use in treating COVID-19.

“Two birds, one stone,” Hung said. “The spike protein’s entry into the human cell has two steps. Tannic acid can inhibit both steps.”

That’s the very good news. Before you start guzzling Malbec, now come the caveats.

First, researchers worked with pure Tannic acid. Hung said that Tannic acid is only a part of the Tannins of wine and it is unknown if all Tannins will have the same effect on coronaviruses.

“Tannin is rich in the red wine because it is also rich in grapes,” Hung said. “However, Tannic acid is not equivalent to tannin. When we do research it is very difficult to use a mixture. What we use is pure compound, and that is Tannic acid. That belongs to the tannin family. Red wine and different fruits, they have Tannins in the tannin family.

“Most of the time when people analyze red wine, they analyze tannin. However, at this moment what we know scientifically is that Tannic acid has the ability to inhibit COVID-19. But will the whole tannin family do that? We don’t know. We have a small group of scientists studying tannin, the whole group. But while working on that, when you have a mixture together, it becomes very complicated.”

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Hung said that normally research like this would proceed at an academic pace – consider the SARS vaccine finally being developed 12 years after the disease disappeared. He was not satisfied with that, even though Taiwan has had a relatively easy time with COVID-19 (its citizens wear masks without complaint) because of the world crisis.

“We need to come out with a strategy that most people would like to know,” Hung said. “I consider this a university social responsibility.”

How much is enough?
He was prepared to answer the logical question: How much red wine would you have to drink to get the positive effect?

Before answering, Hung pointed out several assumptions one needs to make: That all Tannins work; that the wine drinker has an average metabolic rate, because some people can absorb 100 percent of the Tannins in wine into their cells, but others might absorb only 10 percent.

But he did give an estimate: “Based on the human body, based on research, in order for us to drink enough wine to have tannin concentration to reach [inhibitory effect], it would have to be about one liter.”

Drinking a liter of wine every day would cause other health problems and isn’t worth it. But it is encouraging – and significant – that the hypothetical number is not, say, 100 liters.

The reason is this: COVID-19 does not cause symptoms in everyone infected. This means some people carry it in their systems, perhaps for a while. Their immune systems succeed in preventing it from causing illness.

“Those who are COVID-negative, are they really negative?” Hung said. “Their concentration is so low that under the current detection systems, they are not detected. When a virus infects a human being, we are fighting with the virus all the time. If your system is strong enough to fight the virus, you don’t become sick. Since we are fighting with the virus all the time, if you drink red wine, the concentration [of Tannic acid] might not be high enough to reach the level we use in the lab. But the low dose might have a mild prevention effect.”

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I have been trying not to overstate the significance of this research, but there’s no doubt that the following quote is what the wine industry and wine drinkers want to hear:

“If two people are infected by the same amount of virus, but one drinks wine and the other one doesn’t,” Hung said, “The one who drinks the Tannic acid, their protection will be stronger than the other.”

Hung does not drink wine himself; ironically he said he does not have the enzyme to process alcohol (a relatively common complaint among Asians.) Initially he planned to do the research around tea, for which Taiwan is well known.

“I drink tea all the time,” Hung said. “This one, for wine, I did not expect to get so much attention. We knew about Tannic acid, this activity, about a half year ago. We think, we better know more about it. Then we decide, it’s not fair to the community. We decide we have to say what we know. When we first started, we talked about tea.”

But he said wine companies contacted him and urged him to research wine, and he believes it is university social responsibility to do so.

Hung doesn’t drink wine, but his sister owns Lichau Hill Vineyards on Sonoma Mountain; she bought it in 2012 as a weekend getaway and moved there permanently from San Francisco after the pandemic started. Hung says he misses visiting his sister, as well as his son in Houston. Before the pandemic started, he was flying to Houston every month as part of his goal to bring top cancer biomedical research to Taiwan to help people.

The last thing he said in the conversation was: “Stay safe and drink wine.”