Remember that the hangover doesn’t always start the next morning

While we tend to think of them as the pounding headaches and overall sick feeling we wake up with after a boozy evening, Surgey believes that it’s much more helpful to classify them as any moment where alcohol is giving you an experience that isn’t positive.

“Often at Christmas, people tend to start drinking from early in the morning and may already be feeling worse for wear by midday. They don’t realise that what they’re actually experiencing is a hangover,” he says. “If you suddenly start feeling sleepy or lethargic after a lot of drinking, that’s a hangover – even if you’ve not been to sleep yet. But the good news is that you can start to reverse the effects.”

According to Surgey, the best thing you can do to prevent a hangover is understand that, just because you’ve started drinking hard and fast, it doesn’t mean you have to continue that way. “The idea that once you’re on, you’re on is completely the wrong approach,” he adds. “With the right hydration and by eating enough, it’s possible to reverse even the heaviest of starts so that you’ll be feeling fine by the time the cheeseboard is passed around at 7pm.”

Water is key

As basic as it sounds, water really is essential to keeping a fuzzy head at bay. Surgey explains: “Alcohol is a massive diuretic, so it can be quick to dehydrate you, and what leads to the kind of headaches you can experience during and after drinking is something called vasodilation, which comes from congeners.”

Congeners are all the natural flavour and colour compounds found in wines and alcohols in general – and while the general rule is that darker, rich and more heavily extracted drinks like port and deep reds contain more compounds, this doesn’t mean they’re always to ones to blame for feeling less-than fresh the next day.

“In theory, some people can be more affected by red wine, as different colours of wine do have higher and lower levels of histamines, which trigger different reactions, and because it’s darker the congeners would widen your blood vessels a bit more, but ultimately it’s to do with volume and how you drink it: five glasses of sancerre will do more damage than one glass of cabernet sauvignon,” Surgey adds.

How to drink wine (without the hangover) according to someone who does it for a living