Do sweet wines make one fat?


Petis Tours und Süßweine harmonieren ausgezeichnet,

Without a reason, I would not have come up with this question so quickly. Sure, wine has alcohol and it has calories, as we all know. It was the first time I heard that someone refuses a glass of sweet wine for dessert on the grounds that it might make fat because of its calories. I had never tried to get information about calories in sweet wine or wine. So I googled “calories in wine” and on a discounter’s website found the information that the alcohol content (in %) multiplied by 5.5 gives the number of kliocalories per 100 ml of wine. According to a table on this page, a 0.1 l white wine with 12% alcohol by volume has 66 kcal.

However, this only applies to totally dry wines. Wines also have other components that could affect the calorie count. Fully fermented white wines consist of about 81 – 85% water, 12% alcohol, 1% glycerin, 1% non-fermentable sugar, as well as acids, minerals, aromatic and tannins and trace elements. Glycerin and non-fermentable sugars provide about 0.8 kcal per 0.1 l. This shows that the calories in wine come almost exclusively from the alcohol. With sweet wine, however, the calories of theresidual sugar have to be added.

In the case mentioned above, it was around 80 kcal totally, because the sweet wine for dessert, a selection from the Moselle, had 8% vol. alc. (44 kcal) and 95 grams of residual sugar per liter (36 kcal).
In terms of calories, fruit-sweet Late Harvest (Spätlese ~75 kcal) and feinherb Kabinett (~65 kcal) are lower, followed by Beerenauslese (~100 kcal) and Trockenbeerenauslese (~130 kcal). However, if you take into account that sweet wine is usually only drunk in a 0.05 l glass, the calories are halved. Then even a glass of Tokaj aszu 6 puttonyos (85 kcal/0.05 l) doesn’t matter that much.

Because of the calories, you don’t generally have to do without sweet wine, but fortified sweet wines should be consumed in quantities according to their alcohol content. If you want to know how many calories different types of sweet wine have, you will find information on this in the wine calorie table.

Leave a comment