I just posted this on our Facebook page as someone sent me a question on our sweeter wines. She is on a low carb diet but loves Blue My Mind.
Hi Arynn, thanks for the message. Here are some thoughts on Blue My Mind: A bottle of Blue My Mind typically has about 6-7 g per 100 grams of total sugars per bottle, nearly all of it, if not all of it, is fructose. So how does it taste so sweet? Simple, fructose is 2.2 times sweeter in taste than glucose and 1.72 times sweeter by taste than sucrose, or table sugar. Glucose and Sucrose have 4 calories per gram and Fructose has 3 calories per gram. So what do these numbers mean? Total sugars per bottle of wine: 46.12. Per glass 9.22 for 5 glasses per bottle. Calories: 138.36 per bottle, and 27.66 per glass. Alcohol calories: 273.64 in alcohol per bottle, or 54.73 per glass in alcohol. Add in the fructose, total calories per glass should be around 82.39 calories. If we were to sweeten wine with sugar instead of using arrested fermentation, alcohol total calories would jump from 273 to 380 or per bottle. Sugars would jump up from 138 to 310 for a total of 690 per bottle or 137 per glass. And I am trying to be conservative on the sugars. Basically at 3 calories per gram versus 4 for glucose and sucrose, you have a 25% calorie savings if in solution all you have is fructose. At 2.2 / 1.72 times sweeter, a winery adding sugar has to basically double the sugar grams to achieve the same sweetness level as arrested fermentation. Therefore, it’s easy to get to a 60% less carb calories via arrested fermentation even though my calculations above are less than 60%. Again, I am being generous to a wine with added sugar. If you are trying to avoid any sugar calories, dry wine would be the way to go. If you are trying to avoid glucose and sucrose, which are the worst for us sugars, then purchasing European or Turtle Run sweeter wines are the way to go. Here is another thought, speaking of dieting. I absolutely dispise glucose and sucrose. You can point to these two sugars and see most of the diseases that humans suffer from, including cancer. From 2009 to 2014 we studied how yeast ferment sugars and discovered that they really enjoy converting glucose into alcohols first before all other sugars. Sucrose is broken down by the yeast into one part glucose and one part fructose, then of course, glucose is devoured first. Glucose, in the solution of high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are used a lot by our food and beverage industries in their final products. Glucose and sucrose (because of the glucose within sucrose) are addictive sugars, triggering the same endorphin response as cocaine. To my knowledge, fructose does not trigger endorphin responses. Does this help? Thanks, Jim