Many of us are still in post-holiday diet mode, struggling to take off those pounds that magically appeared over the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.
If you’re like me, you’ll finally get back to your ideal weight sometime around mid-November…yup, just in time to watch the scale go haywire again.
One of our regular Vinesse Today readers recently wrote in with a question directly related to this topic. So, before hitting the exercise bike, I thought I’d take a stab at answering it.
“I’m watching my weight,” she wrote, “and was wondering: How many calories are there in a glass of wine?”
Well, it depends…on a few things.
It begins with what I’ve found is a key to all dieting: portion control. Do you fill your wine glass to the brim, or do you allow room for swirling? And how big is that glass?
For example, a standard Bordeaux glass holds a lot more wine than a standard Champagne flute.
The USDA defines a standard glass of wine as about 5 fluid ounces (which would yield about five glasses from a standard-sized bottle).
Now let’s do the math. Each ounce of wine has about 20 calories, so using the USDA standard, a “typical” glass of wine would contain about 100 calories—certainly much better for your diet than a soft drink.
Keep in mind that sweeter wines will have a slightly higher caloric count, but the numbers quoted are pretty accurate for dry table wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay.
I hope that helps. And now it’s time to hop on that bike…
