The Fountain of Youth is a Cabernet
Here’s to the health benefits of wine drinking! This was a fun story to write.
A man in Spain died yesterday. He was 107.
So, what was the late centenarian’s secret to living such a long and relatively healthy life?
Answer: Four bottles of red wine a day. Not four glasses. Four bottles.
What was his blood type? Cabernet?
When it comes to wine consumption, I’ve never viewed myself as a slacker. But Senor Antonio Docampo Garcia makes me and every other “bottle-a-day” wine connoisseur seem like a Pentecostal teetotaler, by comparison. Senor Garcia’s exhausted liver didn’t merely somehow manage to function all those years. It marinated like a juicy tenderloin basting in a zesty rue.
Senor Garcia, to no one’s great surprise, lived on a vineyard in Vigo, a small village in north west Spain. That residential convenience eliminated the need for constant trips back and forth to the liquor store and the cumbersome transport of three cases of wine per week to the Garcia villa. In fact, up until his final days, he produced his very own organic varietal, with no artificial additives.
According to reports, Senor Garcia’s daily ritual included a shot of brandy for breakfast. Then it was time to get serious.
Each day, he drank two bottles of wine with his lunch. Dinner included two additional bottles of wine. During his lifetime, the stubborn Spaniard was estimated to have pounded away about 200 liters of wine per month, about what an average vehicle burns through in gasoline.
Nothing came between Senor Garcia and a wine glass, perpetually within just a short reach. Even on rare occasions when he became ill, as happened at various stages of his long and fruitful life, Senor Garcia refused to ingest any medicines — that is, except his favored daily grape-based elixir.
No further information has been released yet about Senor Garcia’s funeral. Might I suggest, the wine-soaked beast be buried inside a wooden barrel.
That’s what I call “aged to perfection.”