That said, many people do experience headaches when drinking red wine, so much so that Red Wine Headache has been acryonmmed to RWH. While the science is as yet unclear, major suspects include histamine and tyramine, two natural chemicals that can mess with blood pressure and lead to headaches. (Fun fact: Red wines have more histamine, but white wines usually have much more sulfite.) There’s also the inconvenient argument that wine contains lots alcohol, which has a significant dehydrating---and thus headache-inducing---effect.
DIY Sulfite-Removal Systems
But let’s say you have an asthmatic sulfite sensitivity but still want to drink wine and want to get rid of the sulfites. Or maybe you still think sulfites are giving you a headache. Is there a way they can be removed from wine after it’s already in the bottle?
It turns out there is, and that method is far less high-tech than you might think. The solution lies in a familiar brown bottle in every suburban bathroom: hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide oxidizes sulfites, turning sulfite into hydrogen sulfate, which does not cause the types of problems that are associated with sulfites. It’s long been said that a few drops of H2O2 in your wine will eliminate the sulfites altogether, at least in theory.
A number of products on the market also claim to eliminate sulfites in wine. SO2GO ($25 for 100 uses) comes in a small bottle that is sprayed into a glass of wine. (A single-use packet version, designed for desulfitizing an entire bottle, is also available.) Just the Wine ($6 for 25 uses) comes in a tiny bottle and is applied via drops in much the same way, directly into the glass. While there’s some flowery language surrounding both products, it doesn’t take long to suss out their active ingredient: both are simply water and hydrogen peroxide.
I put both products to the test---along with some household H2O2---to see if they really worked as advertised. I tested with old and young wines, domestics and imports, reds and whites.
I used standard sulfite test trips to roughly measure sulfite levels. These strips use shades of pink to approximate sulfites and don’t give you an exact number, but generally I found that untreated wines had sulfite levels between 50 and 100 mg/L, exactly what most experts claim.
Both SO2GO and Just the Wine were effective at lowering sulfite levels, but used as directed, Just the Wine had a greater impact with less product added to the wine glass---its three drops reduced the amount of sulfite in the wine by half. SO2GO’s recommended two sprays took sulfites down by about a third, but another couple of sprays took it roughly to parity with Just the Wine. Neither had any noticeable impact on the taste of the wine---but these were hardly first-growth Bordeaux I caliber wines.
For kicks, I dumped about half an ounce of standard pharmacy hydrogen peroxide into a glass of wine, and that was able to nearly eliminate the sulfites altogether. Unfortunately, at that concentration, the wines succumbed to some seriously off flavors, bitter and metallic notes that were readily noticeable. The custom products might be the same stuff, but it was far easier to control their application and arguably safer than using bulk peroxide, as both claim to use “food grade” H2O2 in their formulation and are designed for small-scale application. The idea of bringing a jug of pharmacy hydrogen peroxide to dinner does have a certain anarchic appeal, though.
So, the TL;DR version of all of this is that sulfites probably don’t cause headaches---at least, they don’t cause your headaches---but if you’re concerned about sulfites you can dial them back a bit (but not completely) through some simple hydrogen peroxide drops.
Or you could just stock up on Advil.
