An Exploration of Sugar in Wine

Is there sugar in wine? 

The answer is: it depends. Some wines have zero sugar, while others are so sweet that they resemble syrup. The majority of wines fall somewhere in the middle: they have a few grams of sugar per glass.

If you’re trying to avoid excess sugar in your diet, you have to be careful about the wines you drink. Most wines contain residual sugar, even if they don’t taste sweet. The trouble is that you can’t always tell a wine’s sugar content by looking at the label. It’s hard to find wine that’s truly sugar-free.

Let’s talk about sugar in wine, how it’s labeled, and a few tips to help you figure out a wine’s sugar content. 

Why Most Wines Contain Sugar

Wine starts out as grape juice, which is full of sugar. During winemaking, yeasts eat grape sugars and convert them into alcohol. As wine ferments longer, alcohol goes up, and sugar goes down. 

Some growers let their wines ferment to completion: the yeasts eat all the grape sugar and the wine ends up sugar-free. Complete fermentation is common in natural winemaking, as well as in high-end wine. Many world-class wines are completely fermented, or close to it, because the winemaker wants to showcase subtlety, complexity, terroir, and balance, rather than sweetness. 

But for most commercial wines, producers stop fermentation early, leaving residual sugar in the finished bottle. Many large producers want residual sugar because it masks flaws in wine, such as excess bitterness or acidity. [*] Sugar is also an easy way to give wine more body, [*] which some drinkers associate with quality. 

As a general rule,  cheaper, mass-produced wines tend to contain more sugar. Sweetness is an easy way to make low-quality wine taste better. 

Do Dry Wines Contain Sugar?

A wine’s “dryness” measures how sweet it tastes. There are four levels of dryness in wine:

• Dry wines don’t taste sweet at all.
• Medium-dry wines have slightly perceptible sweetness.
• Medium wines have easily perceptible sweetness.
• Sweet or dessert wines are a special class of wine, made with unusual techniques that produce both high alcohol and high sugar. Dessert wines are always very sweet. 

Dry wines have the lowest sugar content of any standard wine style—but that doesn’t mean dry wines are sugar-free. The United States has no legal definition for dry wine, which means producers are free to include as much sugar as they want and still label their wines “dry.” In the US, commercial dry wines may contain as high as 12-15 grams of sugar per liter. 

The European Union is stricter. It allows wines labeled “dry” to contain up to 9 grams of sugar per liter, depending on their acidity level. [*] That works out to about 2 grams of sugar per glass of wine. 

You might think you could taste sugar at that level, but sugar is notoriously hard to detect in wine. Many dry wines have high acidity that masks sweetness. As an example, lemon juice contains sugar, but it doesn’t taste sweet because of its intense acidity. The same principle applies to wine: a bright, high-acid wine can have substantial residual sugar and still taste dry. 

The bottom line is: yes, most dry wines still contain sugar. Dry wine has the lowest sugar content of any wine style, but it’s rare that dry wines are completely sugar-free. 

How Much Sugar Is In Different Types of Wine?

The United States doesn’t regulate sweetness in wine labeling. US producers are free to label their wines as they see fit. 

The European Union, however, has strict cutoffs for how much sugar wine can contain. The table below shows the sugar content of still (non-sparkling) wines: [*]

The EU also has separate guidelines for sparkling wines: [*]

If you’re trying to avoid excess sugar, it’s a good idea to choose European wine. It won’t guarantee that your wine is sugar-free, but the EU’s standards make it easier to estimate the amount of sugar you’re drinking. 

How to Find Sugar-Free Wine

While dry European wines are lower in sugar, truly sugar-free wine is hard to find. Even premium wines often have a few grams of residual sugar per bottle. 

Here are three things you can do to find wine that has zero sugar:

1. Drink natural wine (preferably lab-tested). Natural wine is grown with low-intervention methods, which often means the yeasts are left to fully ferment residual sugar. Many natural wines are completely dry, or close to it. If you want to be sure, consider trying our wines. We only source European natural wines, and we test every wine to ensure it has zero residual sugar. 

2. Look for a wine’s technical sheet. Some vineyards and importers provide technical sheets for their wines—breakdowns of chemical analyses that often include a wine’s residual sugar. If you like a wine and are curious about its sugar content, check the producer’s website, or send the vineyard an email and ask for the wine’s tech sheet. 

3. Drink brut nature sparkling wine. Look for a European sparkling wine with “brut nature” on the label. These wines have a maximum of three grams of sugar per liter, which works out to less than a gram of sugar per glass. They aren’t always truly sugar-free, but they’re the closest you can get based on a label alone.