The biggest downside to booze -- besides the hangovers and accidental pronouncements of love to secret crushes -- is the calories. A couple of beers contain as many as a meal, and wine has nearly twice as many calories per ounce than soda.
Enter Slender. It's a wine made by Chateau Thomas Winery out of Indiana and it's advertised as having "no sugar, no carbs, no aftertaste, no kidding." Impossible you say. Wines need sugar so the yeast can metabolize it and emit alcohol as a byproduct. To that Thomas Winery says Zerose.
Zerose is the licensed name of the natural sweetener erythritol. According to Zerose maker Cargill, erythritol has "been part of the human diet for thousands of years as it is present in fruits such as pears, melons and grapes, as well as foods such as mushrooms and fermentation-derived foods such as wine, soy sauce and cheese."
Chateau Thomas founder Dr. Charles R. Thomas realized that being a
sugar alcohol, Zerose can be broken down by the yeast in wine to make alcohol. Thus Slender wines, of which there are three flavors: Slender white, Slender blush and Slender Red.
Before you rush out to buy Slender wine and watch the pounds melt off, there's a little secret about it that's not listed anywhere on the
Slender Web site.
That is, while Slender may contain no sugar, it contains the same number of calories as regular wine.
That's because alcohol has a lot more calories by weight than sugar. One
gram of sugar contains four calories, one gram of alcohol contains seven calories.
So the number of calories in wine depends a lot more on the alcohol
percentage than the amount of sugar. A dry wine with 15 percent alcohol
will have 150 or so calories per five ounces (color doesn't really
matter) while an extremely sweet wine with 11 percent alcohol will only
average about 110 calories per five ounces.
Unless you really need to avoid sugar, stay with regular wine. Because as much as Chateau Thomas may say there's no aftertaste, there's always an aftertaste.
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