Why I Never Recommend Sugar Free Wine
Someone left a comment on our Instagram asking for recommendations for wines low in sugar.
I have to admit, from a personal standpoint, this request, as honest as it was, made me bristle. Wines advertised as, “better for you,” “sugar free,” and – grossest of all – “keto” triggers me back to the fat-free (yet chemical shit storm) 90’s, sugar-free gummy bears, and the latest insane food fad: highly processed protein everything (ice cream! granola! popcorn!)
When you take a minute to come back to your senses (and I have loads of sympathy for everyone confused and desperate enough to buy in. I’m not immune to the shiny packaging either. Manufacturers spend billions on marketing schemes to convince busy and distracted consumers processed food is the way to health nirvana.)
You may also like: Is Wine Healthy?
Bottom line: no sugar means no wine. And no alcohol for that matter, but that’s a discussion for another time. Put simply, sugar, which in the case of wine, comes in the form of the natural juice of crushed grapes, which is eaten by yeast, which then turns – or ferments – that sugar into alcohol.
(This can happen to any fruit or sugar substance, by the way. When I was in school working at a busy downtown restaurant, our ketchup bottles – especially those left on patio tables in the hot summer sun – would sometimes start showing little bubbles, which eventually became bigger bubbles, and to everyone’s surprise, spontaneously started overflowing out of the bottle. The ketchup, with its high sugar content, had started fermenting. This is the premise for the prison wine in Orange is the New Black, where Poussey makes wine in her toilet using the sugar base of Kool-Aid, fruit, and ketchup, with moldy bread serving as the yeast required.)
If the wine is fermented to dry, it means the yeast has consumed almost all residual sugar (RS) and turned it into alcohol. Dry wines have less than 10 grams per litre of sugar. Sweet wines have lower alcohol, because the yeast did not consume all the base sugar.
This is a very simplified explanation, and admittedly, there is a lot of nuances to winemaking and the cause and affect sugar has on a final wine.
It all boils down to science, and I'm a drinker, not a scientist, so I rounded up some articles that I think explain it really well:
- We Need to Talk About the important Role of Sugar in Wine, Wine Enthusiast
- New Year, New Marketing Claim: Why Low Sugar Wine Labels are Misleading, Vine Pair
- Cutting Back on Sugar? Here's What Wine Drinkers Need to Know, Wine Spectator
- The Problem with Wellness-y Wine, The Kit
Basically, like anything you consume – pasta, steak, chocolate – you're probably better off foregoing the "healthy" imitations, and in favour of the real stuff at the best quality you can, and enjoying it in moderation. What moderation means, of course, is a personal choice.