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a symptom—to get a book all to itself argues some distinction, and indeed the roll of gout sufferers in history is as distinguished as it gets. Science writer John Emsley lists some of the known sufferers: Benjamin Franklin, William Pitt, Tennyson, Charles Darwin, and, curiously for an ailment associated with intemperance, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Suspected sufferers include Alexander the Great, Kublai Khan, Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther, and Isaac Newton. It was no respecter of classes, either, despite its reputation as “the patrician malady”: while the port drinkers of the eighteenth century suffered from “saturnine gout,” it also afflicted moonshine drinkers in the twentieth-century United States. Outbreaks of gout were common, often named after where they started: seventeenth-century France was hit by the Picton colic, and the eighteenth century saw the Massachusetts dry gripes. Nor is it even a modern affliction: Roman writers Seneca, Ovid, and Virgil and the vicious satirist Juvenal all poked fun at the gouty, Juvenal suggesting that the famous athlete Ladas “wouldn’t hesitate to take on the rich man’s gout, for there’s not much to be got out of running fast.”

But it’s in the writings of the first-century encyclopedist Pliny that we get our first clue as to what might be really going on. Pliny was a man who knew his wines, and Robert Harris, in his novel Pompeii, has him plausibly first noticing the beginning of the Vesuvius eruption in the ripples in a glass of Caecuban wine, “forty years old and still drinking beautifully.”

Pliny describes the process of making sapa, used as a sweetener for wine or drunk neat: “The wine known as ‘sapa’ is grape must, boiled down until only a third is left; it’s sweeter made from white must.”

And there is the clue: the sapa was boiled down in pans with a high lead content. Could it be that lead was somehow responsible for the gout?

Gout itself is an agonizing inflammation caused by uric acid crystals, like sharp needles, lodging themselves in the joints, particularly of the feet and ankles as gravity does its work. Normally, uric acid is excreted by the kidneys, but lead interferes with the process and the acid crystals build up. So certainly lead is a candidate.

But is it the common link? In the eighteenth century, the port wine so popular in England (and out of the reach of the ordinary man’s pocket) was already contaminated with lead salts: lead oxide dissolved in wine vinegar was used to adulterate wine, both to sweeten it and to kill extraneous yeasts that might spoil the fermentation.

Worse, port—and indeed madeira—were both wines that would keep once opened, and kept they were, in decanters made from crystal that could contain up to 32 percent lead. The lead could, and did, leach from the glass decanters into the wine: after four months, the wine could contain up to 5 ppm of lead, up to 70 percent of which would be absorbed into the body.

This may explain the habit of the time of “taking the waters” at spas such as Bath. The constant water drinking would have increased the flow of urine and washed out, literally, some of the excess lead, allowing the uric acid to be redissolved and alleviating the agonizing symptoms.

And the moonshine drinkers of Kentucky? Their homebrew was often distilled using automobile radiators as condensers; the radiators were held together with lead solder, which, once again, leached into the liquor.

So, yes, port would cause gout—but not by direct cause and effect. The malady was not itself a sort of moral punishment for boozy libertinism, but partly a result of scientific ignorance and partly a side effect of port’s good keeping qualities, which allowed it to lie in decanters and absorb more lead. Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Yes—but only partly.

Why is white burgundy so risky?

WHITE BURGUNDY, made from the Chardonnay grape and aged in oak, can be remarkably delicious, sometimes sublime, and frequently expensive. But it is horribly prone to oxidation, which takes place when the wine is damaged by the small amounts