It’s easy to forget that your favourite bottle of red wine contains more than intricately woven flavours and personality – they also contain calories. And whilst excessive consumption of mince pies often gets the blame for post-Christmas corpulence, chances are all that red wine hasn’t helped either… So, how many calories are in a bottle of 750ml red wine?
Here’s the easy answer: A bottle of red wine 750 ml contains 625 calories.
There are two main factors that affect the amount of calories in your bottle. The first is the alcohol content. The alcohol in a wine generally depends on how much sugar was in the grapes when they were vinified.
Let’s take a look Amarone, whose grapes are partially dried in the sun-drenched hills of northern Italy in a technique known as “Appassimento”. The more heat the grapes receive, the more sugar they will produce. Accordingly this red wine has higher alcohol content, often clocking in at 15% ABV and around 224 calories per glass (that’s 896 per bottle!). In the right hands Amarone is absolutely superb, but best enjoyed in moderation.
One way to tell whether your wine has high alcohol content is to inspect the ‘legs’ by tilting the glass and seeing the wine’s viscosity. Our recommendation is more simple – check the back of the label!
The other factor is the amount of sugar in the wine. Take Port for example. This decadent and sumptuous fortified red wine often contains nearly 1200 calories per bottle. That being said, if you’re glugging a glass of 1945 Graham’s with some Stilton then hat’s off to you!