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Living Differently

Did Jalen Brunson's Champagne Bath Give Him a Headache?

The Knicks doused their MVP in Moët and Ace of Spades, which means it's time for the most stubborn wine myth there is: that the sulfites are what wreck your head. They almost certainly aren't, and the EU-versus-US angle is more interesting than the scare.

By 8 min read Living Differently

The New York Knicks won their first title in 53 years, and the visiting locker room in San Antonio turned into a foam party. Empty bottles of Moët and Ace of Spades piled up on the center table, Finals MVP Jalen Brunson got drenched, Timothée Chalamet wandered in to get sprayed too, and a city that had waited since 1973 finally exhaled.

So here’s the question almost nobody asks out loud but a lot of people quietly believe: a guy gets a champagne shower, drinks some, stays up all night, and wakes up with a pounding head. Wasn’t that the sulfites?

Almost certainly not. The “sulfites give you a wine headache” idea is one of the most durable myths in all of food and drink, and it falls apart the moment you poke it. Let me walk through why, because the real explanation is more useful, and because there’s a genuine EU-versus-US wrinkle hiding underneath that’s exactly this site’s wheelhouse.

What sulfites are, and why they’re in the bottle

Sulfites are sulfur-based compounds (sulfur dioxide and a handful of sulfite salts) used in winemaking as a preservative and antioxidant. They keep wine from oxidizing into vinegar and tamp down stray microbes. Some sulfite also forms naturally during fermentation, so there’s no such thing as a truly sulfite-free wine, only lower and higher.

Because a small slice of people genuinely react to them, both the EU and the US require a “contains sulfites” declaration on any wine above 10 milligrams per liter, which is essentially all of it. That label is why sulfites get blamed for everything. People see the warning, they feel rough the next morning, and the brain connects two dots that aren’t actually wired together.

The myth, taken apart

Three facts, and the story doesn’t survive any of them.

First, almost nobody is actually sulfite-sensitive. The genuinely reactive group is roughly one percent of people, concentrated among asthmatics, and here’s the kicker: when sulfite-sensitive people do react, the reaction is respiratory. Wheezing, tightness, asthma-type symptoms. Not headaches. So even for the rare person whose body truly objects to sulfites, a headache isn’t the signature.

Second, the numbers run backwards. If sulfites caused the classic “red wine headache,” white wine should be worse, because white wine generally carries as much sulfite as red, often more. White needs more protection from oxidation, so it tends to get more. Yet nobody complains about the dreaded chardonnay headache. The thing people blame is highest in the wine they don’t blame. That’s a tell.

Third, there are much better suspects. Alcohol itself is a diuretic and a vasodilator, so it dehydrates you and dilates blood vessels, which is a headache in two steps before any additive enters the conversation. Red wine is also high in tannins and in histamines and other biogenic amines from fermentation. And the freshest lead: a 2023 study from the University of California, Davis (Devi, Levin, and Waterhouse, in Scientific Reports) proposed that quercetin, a compound abundant in red grape skins, can inhibit ALDH2, the enzyme that clears acetaldehyde, the same nasty intermediate behind the Asian-flush reaction. Acetaldehyde piling up means flushing, nausea, and yes, headache. (UC Davis, “Why Does Red Wine Cause Headaches?”; Devi, Levin & Waterhouse, Scientific Reports, 2023)

Notice that every one of those real suspects lives in red wine, the grapes, or the alcohol, not in the sulfite. The champagne Brunson wore, for what it’s worth, is low in tannins and histamines compared to a big red, so if he woke up rough, the culprits were almost certainly the volume, the hour, and the dehydration, not the preservative.

The part that’s actually true, and where Europe comes in

Here’s where the calibrated answer earns its keep, because there is a real EU-versus-US difference, it’s just not the headache one.

The EU caps total sulfites in wine lower than the US does. Under EU rules, dry reds top out at 150 milligrams per liter and dry whites at 200, with extra room for sweeter wines, and quality sparkling wine, the category Champagne falls into, is capped at 185. The US ceiling, set by the TTB, is 350 milligrams per liter across the board. (Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/934, Annex I Part B; US limit, 27 CFR 24.246)

So a European wine often does carry less added sulfite than an American one, sometimes meaningfully less. If you’ve ever come back from a trip swearing the wine in Italy “didn’t do anything to you,” that instinct isn’t pure fantasy. There’s a real regulatory gap.

But, and this is the whole ethos of the site, the gap probably isn’t why you felt better. Sulfites weren’t giving you the headache in the first place, so drinking a lower-sulfite wine isn’t the thing that saved you. The likelier story is the same one we tell about bread in Europe: you were on vacation. You walked everywhere, you drank with food and over a long meal instead of fast on an empty stomach, you were hydrated and relaxed, and you probably had a glass or two rather than a bottle. The setting did the heavy lifting. The lower sulfite cap is real, and it’s a fine thing to know, but it’s a footnote to the headache question, not the answer. This is the honest both-and that the “feel better in Europe” instinct usually deserves.

So, did the champagne give Brunson a headache?

If it did, blame the night, not the sulfites. The all-nighter, the 45-point Game 5 that emptied the tank, the dehydration of drinking after that kind of exertion, and the simple volume of a championship celebration are a complete explanation on their own. The “contains sulfites” line on the bottle is a red herring that’s been misleading people for forty years.

There’s a small final irony worth savoring. Moët and Ace of Spades are both real Champagne, made in France, which means the bottles the Knicks sprayed all over each other were produced under the EU’s stricter sulfite caps in the first place. The fanciest, most American celebration imaginable, doused in some of the lower-sulfite wine on the planet. If sulfites were the villain, that locker room was the safest place in New York.

For the full status of sulfites as a food additive, including the one category the FDA actually did ban them from, see our sulfites ingredient page. Short version: they’re permitted on both sides of the Atlantic, labeled as an allergen above the same tiny threshold, and far less interesting than the myth wants them to be.

Congratulations, New York. Hydrate.

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