Why Does Wine Give You A Headache (But Beer Doesn't)?
The sulfites on the label are the wrong thing to be angry at. The real suspects are harder to spot and nowhere near as settled.
Two glasses of red at dinner, a thumping head an hour later, and the same confident diagnosis every time: "it's the sulfites." It's a tidy explanation. It's also very likely wrong, and the actual answer says a lot more about what's really in the glass.
The sulfite alibi doesn't hold up
Sulfites (sulfur dioxide, added to most wine as a preservative and antioxidant) get blamed constantly, but the numbers don't cooperate: dried apricots and other dried fruit routinely contain several times more sulfite than a glass of wine, without anyone blaming their afternoon snack for a headache. If sulfites alone caused this reliably, dried fruit would be a public health crisis. They're an easy villain mostly because they're the one additive actually printed on the label.
The more likely culprits
Histamines are a stronger candidate — they form during fermentation and skin contact, and red wine, having spent far more time in contact with grape skins than white, contains meaningfully more of them. Some people simply have less of the enzyme that breaks histamines down efficiently, which is why the same bottle can flatten one person at the table and do nothing to the person next to them. Tannin, the same compound behind that dry, gripping mouthfeel, is another suspect under active research. Congeners — the various byproducts of fermentation beyond plain ethanol, more abundant in darker, more complex drinks — are a broader factor across wine and spirits alike, not unique to wine specifically.
Worth being honest about: nobody has landed on one single, universally agreed cause. The research keeps pointing at histamines, tannins, and congeners as the leading suspects rather than any one of them being a proven, settled answer.
Why red gets blamed more than white, and wine more than beer
More skin contact during winemaking means more tannin and more histamine-producing compounds ending up in red wine specifically, which tracks with red being blamed for headaches far more often than white. Against beer, the simpler explanation is just volume of alcohol: a standard glass of wine runs 12–14% ABV against a beer's 4–5%, so glass for glass you're simply taking on a lot more alcohol, faster, which brings its own dehydration and headache risk regardless of what else is in the glass.
None of this makes the headache imaginary. It just means the sulfites on the back label are very likely the wrong thing to be angry at.