Is it better if you stick to wine and avoid any beer or spirits

The short version: wine is not meaningfully different from beer or spirits for urate, but the evidence is too thin to be sure.

The evidence you need does not exist. No trial has compared wine, beer, and spirits head-to-head for their effect on serum urate. The closest data is a 2019 review of purine content in alcoholic beverages [18]. Beer contains measurable purines: about 1.6 mg of adenine and 1.0 mg of hypoxanthine per 100 mL. Wine and spirits have negligible purine content. That suggests beer should raise urate more than wine or spirits through direct purine load, but the review does not test this in humans.

The mechanism is clearer than the numbers. Alcohol itself raises urate through two pathways: it increases purine breakdown and it decreases urate excretion by the kidneys. Both effects are dose-dependent and apply to all alcoholic beverages. Beer adds a third pathway: its purine content provides a direct substrate for uric acid production. A 2003 Danish study of 29,764 women found that wine drinkers had shorter waiting times to pregnancy compared to non-wine drinkers [16], but that study did not measure urate and the finding is about fertility, not gout.

The honest answer: if you are trying to lower urate, switching from beer to wine or spirits removes the purine load from beer but leaves the alcohol-driven urate elevation intact. The net effect is probably small. Cutting total alcohol matters more than switching beverages. No study has measured the difference directly.

My call: switching from beer to wine likely helps a little, but cutting total alcohol helps more. The evidence is too thin to say how much. Confidence: low.