Raise a glass to dropping a few pounds

Low calorie wines for summer and spritzers

Eat local, drink low cal. That sounds like the clarion call to a healthy diet.

But how many calories are there in a glass of wine?

And don’t get trapped into thinking a glass of red wine has more calories than a glass of white.

The calorie count all depends on the amount of alcohol or residual sugar in the wine.

So, basically, the lower the alcohol the lower the number of calories per glass. The LCBO does not have a low-calorie wine category, but they do have a formula by which you can determine the number of calories in a 100 ml serving (equivalent to a 3.5 oz pour).

Look for the percentage of alcohol by volume on the label and multiply that number by seven. Then add the total of the sugar code multiplied by four (this should be printed on the self sticker with the price and the product code number).

Say the wine you’ve chosen declares it’s 12 per cent alcohol and it’s a (1) on the LCBO sugar scale. This computes to 88 calories per serving. If you’re intent on drinking the whole bottle then multiply that 100 ml pour by 7.5 (660 calories).

As a simple rule of thumb, the dry wines from cool-climate growing regions will have lower alcohol readings than those from warm growing regions.

Sunlight develops sugar in grapes. The more sun, the more sugar. The more sugar, the higher the potential alcohol in the wine when it’s finished fermenting. So a Riesling from Germany,whose wine regions are at the most northerly latitude for ripening wine grapes, can be as be as low as 8.5 per cent alcohol, whereas, a Chardonnay from the Napa Valley can be as high as 14.5 per cent or more.

There is a move in California and Australia to bring down alcohol levels. This can be accomplished by picking the grapes when they are not fully ripened or by adding water to the fermenting wine (which really isn’t cricket).

More and more wineries in warm growing regions are reverting to the use of high-tech processes, such as reverse osmosis or spinning cones, that will reduce the alcohol volume by one to two per cent.

If you want to select naturally low alcohol wines for summer drinking, head for German Riesling, Portuguese Vinho Verde, French Vouvray and Muscadet and Portuguese rosés. Most Ontario wines, incidentally, are around 12 per cent alcohol.

If you really want to cut down your alcohol intake, take your wine as spritzers (but please, not Puligny-Montrachet spritzers. Choose a simple wine less than $10 or I’ll cut you out of my will.)

A word to the wise: Drinks, whether they be alcoholic or not, make up about 20 per cent of the calories you consume every day.

I surfed the net to find out how many books I could find on the subject of wine and dieting. In no time at all, I came across The Red Wine Diet, The Wine Lover’s Healthy Weight Loss Plan, California Wine County Diet, The Sonoma Diet and The Sonoma Diet Cookbook.

None of these is French or Italian — which must tell you something.

 

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