Is wine really good for you?

"Wine is good for you" proclamations go way back. Further than the 1991 "60 Minutes" report that the wine-loving French live longer than Americans despite a higher-fat diet, more smoking and less exercise. Even further than Thomas Jefferson's declaration that a tariff on wine is "a tax on the health of our citizens."

Actually, this mantra goes all the way back to the man widely considered the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates, who called wine "an appropriate article for mankind, both for the healthy body and for the ailing man."

But since that "60 Minutes" report, which prompted a 39 percent increase in U.S. sales of red wine the next year, hundreds of researchers have conducted scores of tests on the possible benefits of wine. Many have tagged a compound called resveratrol as the "magic bullet" producing positive effects.

Wrong. Or mostly wrong, new research suggests.

The biggest benefits are derived from the component that makes millions steer clear of wine.

"The key ingredient in alcoholic beverages that affects most health outcomes is probably alcohol itself," said R. Curtis Ellison, who has spent decades studying the effects of wine consumption.

"Wine contains up to 500 different polyphenolic compounds, many of which have been shown to improve health," said Ellison, founder/director of the Institute on Lifestyle and Health at Boston University School of Medicine. "These substances strongly affect the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia."

Resveratrol has little, if anything, to do with red wine's benefit, he said. "It's the whole package of red wine, not the least of the polyphenols."

Among alcoholic beverages, red wine contains the most such compounds and thus the strongest positive effect on health, followed in order by white wine, beer and spirits.

Yet red wine affects people differently, depending on their age, health and presence of specific diseases.

Of course, there's one factor that all of this has in common: moderation.