You’ve seen the posts. Someone off camera filling a wine glass with sugar. Or maybe you’ve seen the one with a wineglass filled with sugar cubes. All promoting their brand of wine as being cleaner, having less sugar, etc. than what must be the dirty wines of their competitors. Being a wine lover and having spent a good portion of my work career in marketing those posts did their job. They caught my eye, but not in the way the company most likely intended.
It made me wonder, and then research, what it is that’s actually in my glass when I pour myself a glass of my favored wine from our cellar? More often than not, my glass holds a nice, Napa Valley, Cabernet Sauvignon.
Like most folks these days, I don’t buy any packaged food without always reading the nutrition label info. Checking for additives, calories, cholesterol, carbs, sugar, etc. So I took a look at the label on the wines in our cellar and while I can easily see where it is from and the alcohol content, that’s about it. And of course the fact it has sulfites, but since I’m not one of the estimated only 1% of the population that is sulfite-sensitive (although higher in asthmatics), and it’s not what causes hangover headaches, I don’t mind it.
Since the purported ‘healthier’ wines advertisements focus on sugar I decided to take a look at what sugar is actually in my glass of Cab.
In the standard 5 ½ oz. pour of a high quality Cabernet there is, at most, .9 (that is 9/10th) of a gram of sugar. Some, especially those produced from mountain fruit have even less!
So not being a chemist I further wondered – how is that compared to other items I might eat or snack on. If I were to believe the many posts I expected to have many healthier choices than my (evidently) bad, old Cabernet!
Here’s a few I checked:
• One standard restaurant packet of C&H sugar – 2.84 grams (3+ times as much)
• One packet of Sugar in the Raw (the little brown ones often seen at Starbucks) – 4.8 grams (5+ times as much
• One piece of bubble gum – 6 grams (6 ½+ times as much)
• One Oreo cookie – 4.9 grams (5+ times as much)
So perhaps I was looking at the wrong foods so I went healthier to fruit:
• One banana – 14 grams (15.5 times as much)
• One Red Delicious apple – 15 to 23 grams dependent on size (16 to 25+ times as much)
• One ‘Halloween size” box of raisins – 25 grams (27+ times as much)
At this point I quit looking and decided this was simply a case of someone marketing far too much ado about nothing.
Cheer, drink responsibly, and feel good when you do! It’s not the sugar-bomb you might think!
