Alcohol (Wine, Beer) and heartburn

Lots of books and websites recommend to stop alcohol completely. Well it may work for some people who didn't drink before - but what to do if you like some alcohol drinks.

In my case after some experiments I figured out that I can drink pretty much any unfiltered wheat based beer without hurting my stomach. Well it still hurts if you drink too much but one glass of Heifeweizen is great to relax after work week. Also some drinking will make you more relaxed and will actually reduce your chance of heartburn.

With wine it is actually more complex. Pretty much all wine in US is acid. Non-acid wine like drinks are ports and dessert wines. If you want to try start with Madeira wine (look for sweet version - no dry or semi-dry ones). It is sweet Spanish wine with great taste.

Any 40% drinks are pretty hard on stomach so it is better to avoid them. Though it may be different in your case.

Wines which your stomach won't suffer from

Tokaj (Tokay) wines

Tokaji, meaning "of Tokaj" in Hungarian, is used to label wines from the wine region of Tokaj-Hegyalja in Hungary. A small quantity of wines from the Slovak wine region of Tokaj also use the Tokaj label, and are referred to as Tokajsky-a-e, meaning "of Tokaj" in Slovak.

Aszu: (Slovak: vyber) This is the wine which made Tokaj world famous and is proudly cited in the Hungarian national anthem. The original meaning of the Hungarian word aszu was "dried", but it came to be associated with a type of wine made with botrytised (i.e. "nobly" rotten) grapes. According to legend the first aszu was made by Laczko Mate Szepsi in 1630. However, mention of wine made from aszu grapes had already appeared in the Nomenklatura of Fabricius Balazs Sziksai which was completed in 1576. A recently discovered inventory of aszu predates this reference by five years. The process of making Aszu wine is as follows: Aszu berries are individually picked out of the bunches, collected in huge vats and trampled into the consistency of paste (known as aszu dough). Must is poured on the aszu dough and left for 24-48 hours, stirred occasionally.

After the aszu dough has soaked, the wine is racked off into wooden casks or vats where fermentation is completed and the aszu wine will be kept to mature. These containers are stored in a cool environment, and are not tightly closed, so a slow fermentation process continues in the wine, usually for several years. The concentration of aszu was traditionally defined by the number of puttony ("hods", Slovak: putna) of dough added to a Gonc cask (136 liter barrel) of must. Nowadays the puttony number is based on the content of sugar and sugar-free extract in the mature wine. Aszu ranges from 3 puttonyos to 6 puttonyos, with a further category called Aszu-Eszencia representing wines above 6 puttonyos. Unlike most other wines, alcohol content of aszu typically runs higher than 14%. Annual production of aszu is less than one percent of the region's total output.

Eszencia: (Slovak: esencia) Also called nectar, this is often described as the most precious wine in the world, although technically it cannot even be called a wine because its enormous concentration of sugar means that its alcohol level never rises above 5-6 degrees. Eszencia is the juice of aszu berries which runs off naturally from the vats in which they are collected during harvesting. The sugar concentration of eszencia is typically between 500 g and 700 g per litre, although the year 2000 vintage produced eszencia exceeding 900 g per litre. Eszencia is traditionally added to aszu wines, but may be allowed to ferment (a process that typically takes at least 4 years to complete) and then bottled pure. The resulting wine has a concentration and intensity of flavour that is unequalled, but is so sweet that it can only be drunk in tiny quantities. Eszencia is incredibly costly, and generally not available at any price on the open market. The vast majority of it is stored away to be added to aszu of lesser-quality vintages. Storage is facilitated by the fact that, unlike virtually all other wines, it maintains its quality and drinkability for 200 years or more. A newspaper account of the 1933 wedding of Polish president Ignacy Moscicki notes that toasts were made with 250-year-old wine, and goes on to say "The wine, if good, could only have been Essence of Tokay, and the centuries-old friendship between Poland and Hungary would seem to support this conclusion."[citation needed]

Forditas: (Slovak: forditas) Meaning "turning over" in Hungarian, this wine is made by pouring must on aszu dough which has already been used to make aszu wine.

Maslas: (Slovak: maslas) Derived from the word "copy" in Hungarian, this wine is made by pouring must on the lees of aszu.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tokaji".

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