In a little over an hour, someone in Canberra will be opening the champers. But according to new research, we should all be a bit freer with the bubbles:
The team served Champagne (equivalent to a glass per day for people) to lab rats for six weeks and found the rodents showed an improvement in spatial working memory, thanks to improved cell-cycle regulation in the cortex and hippocampus, the part of the brain that controls learning and memory.
Lead researcher Dr. Giulia Corona said the tests show promise for humans as well. “Daily supplementation with a low-to-moderate doses of Champagne for six weeks led to an improvement in memory,” Corona told Wine Spectator, “indicating phenolic compounds in Champagne may interact directly with nerve cells, improve the communication between cells and encourage nerves that carry electrical signals in the brain to regenerate.”
Winston Churchill was a spectacular consumer of Champagne, Pol Roger to be exact, and he had an elephantine memory. He also lived to see 90. If only he’d followed the advice of the health lobby …
Prick With A Fork 
That’s true! As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences”.
Having watched a lot of nature shows on TV, its clear that the big cats don’t reproduce in lean times of drought and lack of fresh meat. I wonder what a vegetarian diet is doing to the fertility of all those people on the sunny side of 40 desperately trying IVF treatment , (on the government teat no less)!