Counting calories in wine can be a challenge.
But you can zoom in on them easily by using a couple of calculators on this page. One figures out the calories in alcohol. And the other calculates the sugar level.
If you add the calculations together, you get the total calories in that wine.
There are also some tables below showing the calories in 750ml bottles of wine, as well as 5 ounce glasses of wine.
- alcohol adds 7 grams of calories per liter
- sugar adds 4 grams of calories per liter
- all other components in wine (water, minerals) don’t add any calories worth noting
So dry wines that are lower in alcohol and residual sugar have less calories in them.
The dreaded next day!
What we don’t know:
It’s a bit of a guesstimate as to how much sugar is contained within the bottle.
It should be easy enough to find out…
Except there arenonutrition labels on bottles or boxes of wine. Nada. Zip.
Booze is exempt from placing nutrition labels on it’s products. Hard to believe that I’m writing this in 2018, because pretty much everything else that we ingest has to have them. Rightly so.
In general, cheaper dry wines have more residual sugar in them than the more expensive dry wines. :/
Sugar can cover up some not-so-good flavors in wine. It’s also true that sugar is addictive.
Is the wine you just bought:
- dry
- semi-dry
- sweet
- or dessert?
Because that will determine how much residual sugar, and thus the total calories in wine. Or should. Except…
It seems that there is an obscure benchmark of how much residual sugar (RS) should actually be present in the above styles of wine. And some sources use more descriptors than the above four, like adding extra-dry or medium-sweet to the styles.
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So the only real way to know how much residual sugar is in the wine, is if it’s listed on the bottle. Most bottles don’t include it. But you can use the high end of what the retailer uses for their benchmark in that style of wine, and plug it in to the sugar calculator below.
For instance, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario has a sweetness chart that uses the benchmark 0-8g/l RS to describe a wine as “extra-dry”. So simply use the higher figure of 8g/l (0.8%) as the RS figure to add into the sugar calorie calculator.
It’s not as accurate as knowing the actual RS, but at least by using the higher number – your calorie count will stay within the limits that you want.
In case the RS is only listed in g/l, just divide by 10:
Eg. 2g/l ÷ 10 = 0.2% RS or 13g/l ÷ 10 = 1.3% RSor 40g/l ÷ 10 = 4% RS etc.
Use these simple calculators below to figure out the calories in any wine.
Calories in Wine Calculators
Add the two answers together from each of these calculators to get the total calories.
The amount of calories in a 750ml bottle of wine varies a lot.
If you’d rather not bother with the calculators, you can use the table below. It doesn’t matter if the wine is a still wine, or a sparkling wine. All of the calories in wine come from it’s alcohol and sugar.
To use it, look for the alcohol and residual sugar levels on the bottle of wine. If the RS isn’t listed, check the winery’s website or give them a call! Failing that, use the highest RS number in that wine style from the sweetness chart mentioned above.
White wine contains the same calories as any other wine.
That is, as long as both wines that you’re comparing, have an equal amount of alcohol and residual sugar.
For instance, a 12% dry red or white wine with