Beethoven went deaf from drinking red wine. Or, rather, from drinking cheap red wine. In five locks of preserved Beethoven hair, researchers found between 258 and 350 micrograms of lead. The normal level is less than four micrograms. But let us not be too quick to blame the wine. The wine wasn’t the problem, even though The New York Times reported that Beethoven drank “copious amounts, about a bottle a day.” I don’t think a bottle a day is copious. To me, it seems regulatory. Ask the winemaker. Ask the wine associations that promote wine as a scrubber-outer of over-crusty arteries. It takes a kind of vinegar to dissolve some of the hardest mineral deposits. I know of what I speak. We have very hard water where I come from. I go through a lot of vinegar—although, not, it’s true, as much as I go through wine.
Perhaps you thought, Oh, yes. Lead in the bottles led to the stomach issues, according to the NYT, “unrelenting stomach cramps, diarrhea, and flatulence,” as well as the deafness. But oenologists, in those days, added lead acetate to cheap wine to make it sweeter. These same winemakers aged their juice in lead-soldered kettles. On top of that, Beethoven medicated himself not only with wine but also with seventy-five ointments and prescription drugs that contained lead. You must work hard to get 350 micrograms of lead in your hair. Beethoven was a hard worker, a hard drinker, and very, very sad that he was losing the primary sense that underpinned his artistic career.
I, too, am a fan of copious amounts of wine. I have not had my inexpensive bottles of Bogle Cabernet ($8.99 with a Fry’s card. An extra 10% off if you buy six and, on some very special days, 25% off for those same six bottles. It is practically free.) tested for lead. I haven’t had them tested for alcohol either although I look at the ATPs in my blood work every year. So far so good, but I am receiving a copious number of advertisements for alcohol-free cocktails. I already have my non-alcoholic cocktails. It’s called coffee. It’s called water. Also, tomato juice and licorice tea. I don’t tend to socialize when I’m drinking the non-wine drinks, although I have sat through meetings with only a sip of stiff espresso. Poor Beethoven stopped going to cocktail parties—not because he couldn’t drink but because he couldn’t hear. He didn’t want anyone to say, “You can’t hear and you’re still composing music? What kind of grift is that?” But he was made of music as much as he was made of wine. Musical notes burbled through his wine goblet soldered with lead, into his stomach, and then went to his head where he could imagine what he wanted to hear.
If Beethoven had been a teetotaler, a Mormon, a Muslim, a man with a different habit, perhaps his nervous system wouldn’t have taken revenge upon his ear drums. Perhaps his bowels would have been stable. Perhaps he would have stopped farting. Maybe the wine took his olfactory senses too, but he didn’t need a nose like a winemaker needs a nose, so perhaps no one asked him about his sense of smell. But you can’t undo who you are—which is not to say, one cannot stop drinking—of course one can, of course one can—but if you’re a man with a good ear for music and you start to go deaf, no one would blame you for the copious amount of wine you drank. And, if there is less lead in your wine in 2024 than there was in 1824, well, perhaps your unleaded wine will let you off the hook, let you keep your ears, your nose, all your senses, let you cringe less at the word copious. Maybe the unleaded wine, tasting of cherry and smoke, drunk in the evening under lilac trees blooming the original smell of spring, your lady allowed now bare legs against the cool dirt, will let you see that The New York Times defines the word copious in varying dimensions as the demand changes. Beethoven conducted the Ninth Symphony to copious amounts of applause. He couldn’t hear it. One of the musicians stood up from his chair to pull on Beethoven’s coat sleeve. Beethoven turned to find a copious number of humans reverberating their joy with not only their clapping hands but their stomping feet. He lifted his copious cup filled with a copious amount of wine, and bowed to the intoxicating vibrations flowing from auditorium to stage floor.
