If you want to reduce your carb intake, many foods and drinks should be off the table. Thankfully, wine is not one of them. You can still enjoy a delicious glass of wine without disrupting your weight loss plan and many are available at McLaren Vale winery lunches.
However, when choosing a wine, you must settle for low carb wines. So, which of the wines are low carbs? In this post, you will learn all that you need to know about choosing the appropriate wine to maintain your health goal.
Why Wine has Carbs
It is general knowledge that sugar is a popular source of carbs. When grapes are being fermented during a winemaking process, natural sugars are produced from the combination of yeast and grape. During fermentation, some sugar will be eaten up but some will remain unfermented. This is known as residual sugars
This residual sugar is what turns to carbs in the wine. The rule of the thumb is that wines with low sugar content during fermentation will have fewer carbohydrates at the end of the production. Traditionally, winemakers avoid adding artificial sweeteners or extra sugar to wines during the fermentation process.
However, mass-produced and cheaper brands often add sugar and artificial sweeteners to shorten the fermentation process and modify the flavors. These types of wines are often loaded with carbs and are surely not good for you if you monitor your carb intake.
How to Differentiate Between High- and Low-carbs Wines
Unlike other drinks and foods, it is not easy to decipher information on carbs on the wine labels. Foods and drinks display the sugar content, calories, and carbs in them but wine does not. However, there are tips to determine which wine is low in carbs and which is high.
You must be able to identify specific terms on the labels that give you clues on the content of the bottle. Here are some of them:
- Ice Wine or Eiswein: Any wine that has this information on the label is not low carbs. Eiswein is produced by squashing frozen grapes. The final product is usually highly concentrated in sugar. Of course, they taste delicious and delightful. However, they are very high in carbs.
- Dessert Wine: Another name for this is a sweet wine. This type of wine is incredibly sugary and blends well with desserts and sweet puddings. However, you should avoid them if you are trying to cut down on your carbohydrate intake.
- Spatlese or Late Harvest: Wines produced from grapes that have been left longer in the vineyards are late-harvest wines. They taste sweet because of the high sugar content, making them a source of high carbs.
- Doux or Suss: The French word for sweet is doux and for the Germans, it is suss. When you see either name on a wine bottle’s label, you should know that it is a sweet wine and therefore, it will be high in carbs.
- Fortified Wine: Examples of fortified wines are Madeira, Sherry, and Port. These types of wines are produced with very high alcohol levels. This kills the yeast during the fermentation process, leaving more sugar in its wake. Although fortified wines are great to pair with cheese, they should not be considered if you are looking for a low-carb wine.
Conclusion
If you love wine, cutting it out completely from your diet may be a hard thing to do. The good news is that you do not have to give up wine entirely. You can choose wines with fewer grams of net carbs, such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
A 5-ounce serving of these wines has a little over 3 grams. Some others can pack up to 43 grams of carbs per the same serving.
