Luckily, being lied to is a great excuse to drink heavily. 

May 25 is National Wine Day, which makes for the perfect excuse to get drunk mid-week.

But while we love to drink wine, we don't really know all that much about it. We know grapes are involved some way or another and it comes in thick glass bottles which could be really useful in the event of a home invasion. Other than that, we kind of just go along with it and buy whatever bottle (or 5 liter box) has the coolest looking label.

As it turns out, there are a lot of myths about wine and what we thought we knew all along is all just a lie. If you’re going to celebrate National Wine Day like a real wine-o, you should at least know what wine "facts" are just popular myths.

The health benefits of red wine are way overblown

Every housewife from here to Shanghai will claim they're drinking a fifth glass of red wine in a night because “red wine is good for you” — and not because their rampant alcoholism. Something about antioxidants or whatever they heard on the Wendy Williams Show. So drinking wine is actually healthy. Yes, red wine has antioxidants in it. However, the amount of antioxidants in wine is far less than people think. 

Red wine might not be any better for you than just alcohol in general. The whole antioxidant thing people rant about in wine is comes from a compound in grape skin called resveratrol. The studies that concluded resveratrol is good for the heart were mostly performed on mice in a lab setting. These mice weren't just sipping a miniature glasses of cabernet. To consume similar quantities as were administered in mice, you’d need to drink 1,000 bottles a day. You’d probably die from drinking 10 bottles in a night so good luck with that. There's also a good amount of research that suggests regular alcohol consumption increases your risk of cancer, which obviously outweighs the minute benefits that antioxidants may provide. 

Most wines do not improve with age

Yeah, that 10-year-old bottle of Yellow Tail you’ve been saving to drink when you finally manage to pay off your credit card debt is going to taste like pissy vinegar. Very few wines actually age well. Like very, very few wines. The wines that age well are high quality wines, from a great harvest year (vintage) and are stored perfectly. Besides those rare instances where an already perfect wine is perfectly aged, you should drink your wine soon after purchasing it. The longer most wines sit, the worse they will taste. 

Basically, nothing your poor-ass can afford is going to age well. Even if you managed to get a wine that could age well, you'd probably fuck it up by storing it in some cheap wine rack you bought at Pier 1 and not a 500-year-old wine cellar in Tuscany.

You are probably serving wine all wrong

People really don’t know what they are doing when it comes to serving wine correctly. From letting bottles of wine breathe for no reason to serving wine in the wrong type of glass, people really do wine all wrong. However, the biggest thing people mess up is the temperature they serve wine.

Reds should not be served at room temperature. Room temperature is right around 70°F, and that is much warmer than the ideal temperature to serve red wine. Red wine should be lightly chilled and served at a temperature around 50°F to 60°F. So put that ever so fancy bottle of Apothic Red in the fridge for like 20 minutes before you pour it. You'll really impress your wine connoisseur friends with that one. 

While you should put red wine in the fridge to cool off before you serve it, you should take white wine out of the fridge and let it warm up. White wine should be served at 45°F to 50°F. Straight out of the fridge it’ll be around 40°F, which is way to cold. You don't want to be that asshole giving your guest's brain freezes with your overly chilled wine, do you? 

Wine experts don't know what they're talking about

Sure, wine experts and sommeliers can probably identify a Cabernet from a Merlot no problem. There is for sure some credence to the idea that people can have crazy abilities to distinguish flavors in wine and all that. However, numerous studies have shown that things like the bottle a wine is presented in and the price of a wine can have a huge impact on the way experts perceive the quality of a wine. They are of course open to suggestion as any human is. Which is why most wine competitions are usually blind taste tests. 

Then there was the famous study that gave wine experts two glasses of wine — one red and one white. The experts described the white wine as they would describe any white wine and described the red wine as they would describe any red wine. However, the problem was they were the same exact wine. The red wine was just the white wine dyed with food coloring.

France does not have the best wine

The French really like to think that they have the best wine in the world. While they certainly have good wine, the notion that they have unquestionable the best wine in the world is ridiculous. Right now there are more great wines than ever before and thinking that they all must come France is ludicrous. Maybe back in the 1800s that was true, but it certainly isn't true today. 

In blind taste tests, French wine has regularly lost to American wines. Take a good wine from New Jersey or California and it's just as delicious as a good wine from France. While this doesn’t discount French wine altogether, their insistence on something called terroir does. Terroir is the idea that everything in the lifespan of a grape affects a wines characteristics. While things like climate and production methods certainly do, the idea of terroir extends to some psychic kinda connection the grapes have with the earth. Terroir promotes the idea that French soil is better than soil elsewhere in the world. While one region can have more nutrient dense soil than another, this does not affect the taste of a grape.

Terrior is basically just some French marketing scheme. Experts have increasingly called terroir bullshit. Even if certain soil bacteria did affect the quality of wine, winemakers could just put that bacteria in their soil and bam! mystically terroir wine is created.