Calories in wine(s)

I would be grateful for a referral to a good source of information (preferably somewhat layperson-accessible) on the caloric content of different wines. In particular, I'm curious whether "stickies" (esp. icewine) have higher calorie counts than dry wines. Unfortified stickies as a class have higher amounts of residual sugar, I would assume, but can be low in alcohol content--and I've always believed alcohol was the largest source of calories in wine. I've been surfing this question, and there's a ton of confusion and contradiction on the topic in cyberspace. The USDA had what looked to be a promising nutritional info search function, but even with 34 different wine listings, it doesn't account for variables like alcohol by volume. Thanks in advance for any advice.

No direct answer but I suspect do-it-yourself might be the best way to go since every wine's going to be different. I'd just make the assumption that almost all the calories in any wine come from either the alcohol or the residual sugar. It should be easy via your favorite internet search engine to find the caloric content of ethanol and sugar. Combine with the alcoholic content and residual sugar of whatever wine you have in mind, then do the math. On your specific question, I don't know what happens to calories when a certain amount of sugar gets converted to ethanol but my guess is that "stickies" would in fact have more calories than dry wines; they're generally made from riper fruit with higher sugar content than dry wines and that extra sugar is present in the final product whether still sugar or as alcohol.

I always work on the assumption that a bottle of "dry" table wine with 13° alcohol contains roughly 600 calories. Stronger and/or sweeter wines would contain more. German sweeties tend to be low in alcohol so this factor may largely offset the extra sugar.

Generalizations are to be avoided but they do have their use. Thus, as a rule of thumb, and assuming a pour of 5 fluid ounces (150 cc) of wine:

Red wine = 150 calories/glass
White wine = 125 calories/glass
Dessert Wines = 235 calories/glass

Keeping in mind that the average pour of a dessert wine is only about 100 cc. that would mean
156 calories/100 c.c. glass.


Best
Rogov

An average pour of dessert wine is far larger in my house...