I've always wondered why Red Wine makes many people TALK like mad!
I'm one of those people, beer doesn't do it for me.. doesn't go down
well at all no matter how much I drink. But Red Wine seems to be the
cure for social situations and I havn't been able to find out why..

What I want to know is the "properties" of red wine that enhances
people's social ability and WHY this happens.

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Clarification of Question by getmatthews-ga on 23 Oct 2005 23:39 PDT

I should like to add that I have found out that the TALKING inducing
part of wine may be due to the calming effect is has on many people. 
So what particular substances in the red wine promote this calming
effect? (Apart from the alcohol)

Unless there's some obscure neurochemical element in red wine that I'm
unaware of (and I'm aware of most...) the effect of people talking
more because of drinking red wine is almost certainly due to the
alcohol content.  The fact that you seem to only notice this with red
wine is probably due to the fact that, due to either your taste or
other preferences, you like red wine better than beer or white wine
and therefore drink more of it, augmenting alcohol's well-documented
effect of "loosening people up."   This make sense?  anyone else?

It could be the company you drink red wine with (vs beer), or do you
talk to yourself after a couple of glasses? ;)

Supposedly red wine contains iron, also it thins the blood or widens
the arteries (I can't remember which, but either stimulates blood
flow) and it is not unknown for people who have had heart attacks to
be told to drink red wine.

There is another possibility, some genetic groups are supposed to be
fairly impervious to alcohol derived from some sources, and rapidly
intoxicated by alcohol from other sources. Supposedly the Japanese
rapidly get paralytic on grain based alcohol - I've seen some evidence
of that, and heard contemporary evidence.

From extensive controlled and scientific experiments, I have concluded
that different alcoholic beverages have widely differing immediate
effects.

I think that depends on the person, not on the color of the wine (or beer)...

Another possibility is the alcohol content:
beer: 3-8%
white wine: ~12%
red wine: 14%
so you may just be consuming more alcohol than you think...


http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002446.htm

As a chemist... It's pretty much all of the above. Red wine contains
more alcohol than beer (petty similar to white wine) so you need less
of it to get drunk, in fact because it's more concentrated your body
digests it faster getting the alcohol in to your system faster than a
more dilute beer. So not only do you need to drink less to get the
same amount of alocohol, that alcohol will go in to your system faster
and so get you drunk quicker. On top of that if you like the taste of
red wine over beer then your going to drink the wine faster... pretty
much just summing up what everyone else said!