1. Smile – red wine is a dentist's friend

Drinkers often complain of ‘red wine mouth’, that vampire's grin you get after drinking to excess. However, research suggests red wine could actually be good for your teeth.

Spanish scientists dipped cultures of bacteria responsible for dental diseases into various liquids, and found that red wine was the most effective at removing the bacteria.

So, raise a glass and say cheers to a cavity free life.

2. It improves your balance

If you stumble after drinking red wine, you may be doing it wrong. An experiment on laboratory mice found a diet rich in resveratrol - a compound found in red wine - improved older mice’s balance over time.

"Our study suggests that a natural compound like resveratrol...could actually decrease some of the motor deficiencies that are seen in our aging population," the scientist who led the experiment told the American Chemical Society.

3. It keeps the bed bugs away

Bed bugs live off human blood - but they are less keen on the blood once the human in question has drunk a couple of glasses of red wine, according to research carried out at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States. Drinking more wine, then, could lead to fewer bug bites (or you could tackle the problem head on and try getting rid of the insects).

4. It keeps you mentally agile

People who drink a glass of red wine a day are less likely to develop dementia, especially Alzheimer's, according to a study conducted at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

The academics found that subjects who drank between two and three units a day were almost a third less likely to be showing signs of dementia at the end of a three-year-period than those who were teetotal.