Calorie Count Part 1 – Wine

It’s that time of year again.  You know the time AFTER the “most wonderful time”.  This is the time when everyone starts to count calories again.

Calories in wine can be confusing.   Nutritional facts are not required on the labels.  The USDA offers calorie count and nutritional information based on varietal, but wines from different locations, vintages, and brands vary even when varietal does not.

You can determine, fairly accurately, the number of calories a glass of wine adds to your daily count.  The calories in wine are mostly accounted for by sugar and/or alcohol.  During fermentation, yeasts eat sugars and convert them to alcohol.  In a wine that tastes dry, not sweet, the calories can be calculated by the percentage of alcohol.

For dry wines there is a calorie count formula:

Calories in a sweet wine come from both alcohol and residual sugar.  You could go online to the winery, get the tech sheet showing the amount of sugar in the wine, and make a calculation.  Most of the sweeter wines you might drink with dinner, Riesling for instance, are lower in alcohol because not all of the sugar was fermented. So while there are sugar calories, there are fewer alcohol calories – and alcohol has more calories than sugar per gram.

Yes, you too can look suave and sexy whipping out your calculator at dinner.  Or how about ignoring your date while you check the USDA site on your smart phone? OR you can ball park it like this:

 

Please note that this is true regardless of the color of the wine. I believe the idea that red wines are more caloric is fueled by the fact that wines such as Mourvedre and Zinfandel have high alcohol percentages.  Let’s not forget that many white wines, such as Chardonnay and Viognier, can also reach high alcohol levels depending on where they are grown.