Driving to work this morning I noticed a new billboard for something called one.6 Chardonnay. It had a tagline something like, “finally great taste and low-carb in one glass.”
What the holy fuck is that all about!?? Somebody please put the break on this infernal Atkins Low-Carb out-of-control hype!
According to the USDA, wine doesn’t even have carbohydrates. They have “Carbohydrates, by difference”.
ALL WINE IS LOW-CARB so why for the love of Zymurgy does The Brown-Forman Corporation misleadingly say “finally” as if it hasn’t always been that way? This is bullshit and it’s all the fault of marketing people who are capitalizing on the gullibility of consumers who will buy anything marketed as “low-carb”. Morons.
Eh? A glass of red wine is probably gonna add less then 100 calories to a meal, and has plenty of health benefits. I don’t see any reason why wine couldn’t be part of a diet.
If you’re drinking enough of it that the numer of carbs in it makes a difference, you’re probably in danger of getting drunk enough that you’re going to blow your diet.
If you’re micro-managing your diet to the point where you say, okay, it’s got this really teeny amount of carbs, so I can have one glass, even that small amount of alcohol can have an unpredictable effect on your metabolism, so it’s still kind of a crap shoot.
It’s like Tums having the big advertising point: It’s got calcium! Yay! If you have to eat enough Tums that the amount of inert components makes a difference, you have much greater things to worry about than how much calcium you’re getting in your antacid… how about that ulcer that’s forming?
The ads I’m thinking of show a lot of ultra-stressed businessmen, using Tums to try and keep things under control. Don’t remember too many pregnant women in the ads.
In my local Trader Joe’s last week, where they usually have little nibblings to sample and small dixie cups to be filled with whatever sickly-sweet beverage they’re hawking that week, they were offering a taste-test of water. And it was indeed marked as No-Carb! No-Fat!
I mean, it was nice water and all; chilled, and with lemon wedges in it. And the bottle was very pretty. It was everything you’d want in a water.
Everything on the USDA database has “carbohydrates by difference,” even things like bread. I couldn’t find info in their FAQ on exactly how the number of carbohydrates is measure, but “by difference” doesn’t mean “doesn’t have measurable carbohydrates.”
And no, not all wine is low in carbohydrates. A sweeter wine can have considerably more, as can a fortified wine. A sweet white wine has about 14 grams of carbohydrate in a 3.5 oz glass according to the USDA database. Can’t link directly since it’s framed HTML, but it’s easily searchable from here for anyone interested.
Frankly, I’ll be glad if they start putting nutritional information on wine consistently. I don’t like sweet wine, and it’s not always obvious what’s sweet and what’s dry from reading the info on the bottle.
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