Who's the PR for red wine? Whoever it is, he (or she) is doing a brilliant job.

Hardly a week passes without a new plug for the healthful properties of the drink. Today's  Daily Telegraph reports that women who drink red wine have a better sex life. Kingsley Amis (I think it was) always hoped one day to see an ad for beer that simply claimed: "Beer makes you drunk". How soon before we see one saying "Wine makes you sexy?"

The Telegraph story comes from a paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine from a seven-strong team (all men) from Florence. They recruited 798 women, aged between 18 and 50, living in Tuscany and compared their drinking habits with a measure of their sexual health, called the Female Sexual Function Index. Moderate drinkers of red wine (one to two glasses a day) scored higher for sexual desire and for overall sexual health than non-drinkers or those who drank more than two glasses a day. 

There are thousands of ways of explaining this result that don't involve any magic ingredient in red wine. But that's the conclusion to which this team is inexorably drawn - in spite of what they admit is a small sample size, self-reported data, and the lack of support from laboratory examinations.. Why doesn't this surprise me?