Kulers Uncorked: Low-Calorie Wines Abound

The product in question: Low-calorie wines.

You may have seen them on the shelves: Skinnygirl, The Skinny Vine and the newly launched Flight Song. If you want to believe the marketing statements, these are painstakingly researched products—years in the making—that have required breakthroughs in fermentation science. And, it would seem, they’ve cracked the code and removed the calories but not the taste.

Shenanigans!

In short order, I’m going to suggest four ways to have your own low-calorie wine your way. But first, let me just tell you what’s going on here. These producers have simply removed some of the alcohol from the wine, sort of like light beer.

Here’s the key difference between light beers and light wines: there are already wines that have low alcohol. These wines have been made for millennia; they just don’t have a cute logo, a massive marketing budget and a name that vaguely promises that you’ll lose weight if you drink them.

From the Loire Valley to New Zealand—and all the chilly winemaking places in between—winemakers produce low-calorie wines because they can’t do much else due to their lack of calorie-producing sunlight. The preponderance of calories in just about any alcoholic beverage is the alcohol.

Sunlight ripens grapes. Every day in the sunshine creates more sugar until it’s harvest time. More sun. More sugar. If you squeezed a bunch of grapes and drank the juice, you’d get all your calories from sugar. A hot winemaking region produces grapes with more sugar and more calories. If you ferment all that sugar, you would get your calories from the alcohol instead of the sugar.

Don’t believe me? Then ask my friend and registered dietitian Carolyn O’Neal, who writes the nutrition column for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and recently published wonderful The Slim Down South Cookbook:

“My favorite wine to cut the calories and add a lift to life is Champagne. With only 78 calories in a four-ounce flute, dry or brut Champagne is one of the lowest calorie wines you can pour. I like to imagine that the bubbles displace some of the calories, too.”

The Champagne region of France is one coldest, sun-starved anywhere. Some years, the best they can do is make a wine with 9 percent alcohol. When they create the bubbles, they’ll bring the alcohol level up to just about 12.5 percent (and as O’Neil says, carbon dioxide bubbles are calorie-free).

Eureka! A low-calorie/low-alcohol wine. In addition to Champagne, there are thousands of similar wines to choose from. Rieslings from Washington State, muscadets, chenin blancs and sauvignon blancs from the Loire Valley, pinot noirs from cool growing regions like Oregon, New Zealand and Burgundy, they all can be relatively low in alcohol (sweet wines are another story). All you have to do is read the label.

Here are my four alternatives to skinny wines:

Officer Barbrady, get the broomsticks ready.

Gil Kulers is a sommelier and maitre d’ for an Atlanta country club. You can reach him at gil.kulers@winekulers.com.

Note: Wines are rated on a scale ranging up from Thumbs Down, One Thumb Mostly Up, One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Up, Two Thumbs Way Up and Golden Thumb Award. Prices are suggested retail prices as provided by the winery, one of its agents, a local distributor or retailer.