What’s the Deal with Low Cal Wine?

So it happened to me. I bought a bottle of low cal wine by mistake. It was a Kim Crawford Sauv Blanc for a summer party. Sure there was a big 70 on the label, but it could mean anything. Calories were the last thing on my mind. In any case, I didn’t realize the oopsie till I was cleaning up post party. Before I share my thoughts on the low cal wine, let’s go into how wine calorie count works. 

Kim Crawford low cal Sauv Blanc

Alcohol and Carbs

There are two main sources of calories found in alcoholic beverages: alcohol and sometimes carbs. Per CDC guidelines, a standard drink contains 0.6 ounces or 14 grams of pure alcohol. This translates generally to:

• 12 ounces of beer with 5% alcohol by volume (ABV)
• 5 ounces of wine with 12% ABV
• A shot or 1.5 ounces of liquor or distilled spirits (80-proof or 40% ABV)

Considering that every gram of alcohol yields about 7 calories, one standard serving of an alcoholic beverage has 98 calories just from the alcohol alone.

Alcohol by Heshan Perera on Unsplash

Now, let’s add the carbs. One gram of carbs yields about 4 calories. Depending on the style of beer or wine, the amount of carbs may vary widely. A Pilsner may have about 12 grams of carbs per serving while a Belgium Fruit Lambic could have 25 grams. As for wine, 5 ounces of dry wine may have 1 gram of carbs whereas 2 ounces* of dessert wine may have 13 grams. Distilled spirits on the other hand have no carbs.

* Note that a non-fortified dessert wine has the same ABV as a dry wine. I chose 2 ounces for a serving of dessert wine, which is below the 14 grams of alcohol per serving guideline. However, a small amount of sweet wine goes a long way.

Sugar by Elena Leya on Unsplash

Based on that, one could approximate that:

• 12 ounces of Pilsner have 146 calories (48 from carbs + 98 from alcohol)
• 12 ounces of Belgium Fruit Lambic have 198 calories (100 from carbs + 98 from alcohol)
• 5 ounces of dry wine have 102 calories (4 from carbs + 98 from alcohol)
• 2 ounces of non-fortified dessert wine have 91 calories (52 from carbs + 39 from alcohol)
• A shot of distilled spirit only has 98 calories, all from alcohol

More Alcohol

Until recently, the trend of alcohol content in wine has been “more is better.” The ABV of a table wine rose from 12% in the 1990’s to over 14% today. The London International Vintners Exchange or Liv-ex that tracked tens of thousands of bottles of wine shared that the rise in ABV was evident across major wine regions. Burgundy is the only region where the increase is more restrained.

This trend toward the big alcoholic wine is attributed in part to climate change. As vineyard temperature rises, grapes ripen with a higher sugar content. Since sugar converts to alcohol during fermentation, this results in a higher ABV wine. The other driver of a higher alcohol wine is the market demand for international style (or some would argue “Parkerized”) wine. Robert Parker’s 100-point wine rating system has influenced vineyards and wineries all over the world to produce wine that is high in alcohol and tannins with lower acidity and in-your-face bold flavors.

Less Alcohol

However, with the new generation of wine consumers, there is a move away from the international style to natural wine, where ABV generally runs in the 10-12% range. Millennials and drinking-age Gen Z also tend to prioritize what they understand to be healthy living. To them, calories matter more than complexity in wine. According to Impact Databank, while the US wine market volumes continued to drop for the third consecutive year in 2023, low calorie wines were posting double-digit growth.

Some of early entrants of to “healthier” wine market include Avaline and Bev. Soon the big commercial mass wine producers such as Kim Crawford and Bota Box also jumped on the band wagon to offer lower calorie options. For Kim Crawford’s 70-calorie Sauv Blanc, this means dropping the ABV from 12.5% to 7% using a technology called Spinning Cone Column (SCC).

Less Taste?

In 2021, the National Library of Medicine published a study on Techniques for Dealcoholization of Wines: Their Impact on Wine Phenolic Composition, Volatile Composition, and Sensory Characteristics. The research looks at different technologies (of which SCC is one) and the different points of the winemaking process where dealcoholization may take place. Almost twenty wine samples were used in the experiment.

Despite efforts to preserve and/or recover as much of the wine aroma and flavors during the dealcoholization process, there was a loss in total volatile aroma compounds by 4-18% depending on the wine. The composition of these compounds are critical to the overall aroma and flavor of the wine. As a result, the reduced alcohol wines exhibit flavor imbalance, a lack of body, increased astringency, bitterness and acidity compared to original wines. The experiment also suggested that at around 2% reduction in ABV, the drop in wine quality became increasingly perceptible.

Here are my thoughts on the Kim Crawford’s 70-calorie Sauv Blanc

I tasted the wine both prior to and after I discovered my mistake. In the first case, I thought the wine tasted different from the other Kim Crawford I have had in the past and wrote it off as a bad vintage or the result of increased mass production. I became more intentional in my tasting when I realized that it was a low cal wine. It still smelled like a Marlborough Sauv Blanc and has the same acidity and brightness on the palate. However, the flavors seemed muted and diluted. It was after all a 5-6% reduction in ABV. 

My Verdict: Since I don’t drink a huge quantity of wine (although I do enjoy a glass everyday), wine quality matters more to me than calories. Sure, it means that I am consuming 50 calories more than I need. But I can live with that. On the other hand, I will always pick a diet soda over the regular. I don’t drink enough soda to differentiate the taste of one over the other so I will save the calories. What about you? What will you choose?

Alphabet Soup of Wine

You may have noticed that some wineries provide technical sheets for their wines. These sheets often contain a bunch of acronyms - pH, TA, RS, and ABV. Ever wonder what they mean and whether you should care? Let’s demystify this alphabet soup of wine.

Alphabet Soup by Sigmund on Unsplash

pH 

pH stands for potential of hydrogen or power of hydrogen. It measures the acidity or alkilinity of an aqueous solution. The pH scale ranges from 1 to 14, with 7 being neutral. Wine is acidic, and its pH usually runs in the 3’s. White wines pH is typically in the 3.0 to 3.6 range, and red wines in the 3.4 to 3.9 range. Wines with lower pH tend to be more puckering on the palate, while wines with higher pH tend to be rounder. Think lemon juice versus tomato juice.

pH Scale by Alvy16 on WiKimedia Commons

In the vineyard, pH is used in conjunction with TA (or Titratable Acidity), sugar, and flavor to determine the optimal time for harvest. pH in grapes increases as they ripen and further rises incrementally during the fermentation process. If pH is lower than 3.0, it may be an indication that the grapes have been harvested before they are fully ripened. The resulting wine flavor may not be well developed. The reverse is true if pH is more than 4, suggesting a flabby wine with little acidity to liven it. 

Fun Fact: Acidity acts as a buffer to preserve wine. Wine collectors often favor a vintage with a lower pH for cellaring.

TA

TA is often used to refer to Total Acidity and Titratable Acidity interchangeably. The truth is that Total Acidity is the measure of both titratable and non-titratable acids. However, because Titratable Acidity is easier to derive, it is often used as an approximation of Total Acidity. In this blog post, TA refers to Titratable Acidity. A good TA range for white wines is 7-9 g/L and that for red wines is 6-8 g/L. 

While pH measures the intensity of acids, TA measures the concentration of acids. To illustrate the difference between pH and TA, let’s make a Bloody Mary.

 

Bloody Mary by Toni Osmundson on Unsplash

1. Mix 0.5 oz of lemon juice to 2 oz of vodka and taste it. It will likely pucker you up! 

2. To that, add 4 oz of tomato juice, mix, and taste again. It will taste less sour. 

Both lemon juice and tomato juice are acidic ingredients. However, lemon juice contains citric acid which has a low pH of 2, while tomato juice contains a blend of citric, malic, and ascorbic acids with a combined pH of 4.1 to 4.4. So even though the concentration of acids (or TA) in the drink has increased with the addition of the tomato juice, the intensity of the combined acids has decreased.

 3. Now add your Worcestershire sauce, Tobasco sauce, horseradish, celery salt, and all the other good stuff and enjoy!

Fun Fact: While some wine collectors use pH as an indication of good acidity and therefore aging potential, others use TA as a measure. A vintage with a higher TA is definitely preferred for aging to a vintage with lower TA. 

RS

RS stands for residual sugar, the leftover grape sugar after alcoholic fermentation is completed. RS is measured using g/L or %. (10 g/L is 1% residual sugar.) Most dry wines will have close to zero residual sugar so you don’t typically see RS listed in the tech sheet. Sweet wine starts at about 35 g/L or 3.5% RS and can go up to over 200 g/L or 20% RS. 

Sauternes by Jeff Burrows on Unsplash

Some of the best sweet wines are produced as a result of botrytis, also known as Noble Rot. Botrytis is a type of fungus that causes grapes to shrivel. As water content evaporates from the grapes, the sugar level increases and intensifies. This causes alcoholic fermentation to complete with excess sugar remaining. Famous botrytized wines include French Sauternes, Hungarian Tokaji, and German Beerenauslese or Trockenbeerenauslese.

Fun Fact: The most expensive botrytized wine is the Royal Tokaji Essencia that at one point cost $40,000 a bottle. The last I checked, you can get a half bottle for about $1,000.

ABV

Last but not least, ABV stands for Alcohol by Volume. It measures how much alcohol is in 100 mL of wine and uses % as the unit of measure. ABV of a wine is dependent on the grape sugar pre-fermentation. During alcoholic fermentation, wine yeast converts grape sugar into ethanol. Wine grapes or vitis vinifera often reach 22 to 26 degrees Brix (symbol °Bx) by harvest. 1 °Bx is 1 g of sugar in 100 g of crushed grape juice and will yield about 0.55% in alcohol content. 22 to 26 °Bx will yield about 12.1 to 14.3% ABV.

Measuring Brix

While most new world wines tend to run high in ABV, some European wines have less than 10% ABV. Moscato d’Asti runs around 5-6% ABV, and German Riesling runs around 7-8% ABV. By law, these old world wines are required to stop fermentation before all the sugars are converted to alcohol to create the respective styles of sweet wines.

Fun Fact: In the United States, the alcohol excise tax for wine above 16% ABV is about 50% higher than that for wine at 16% ABV and below. For that reason, you will not see many bottles of wine (if any!) with ABV above 16%.

I hope you enjoy the demystifying of the alphabet soup of wine and gain some confidence in reading wine technical sheets. And if you are hoping to start a wine cellar, you are now armed with a bit more knowledge on how to pick wines with aging potential. Salud!