Jancis awarded the Torres and Earth Award
Before I get into major headlines today, I want to congratulate Jancis on receiving the Torres and Earth Award yesterday at the Spanish Embassy in London. The awards were born out of Torres’ commitment to reducing their carbon footprint and the recognition that they can’t do it alone as it requires the help of their partner industries. For this reason, they’ve awarded growers, glass manufacturers, logistics providers and now a writer this award for helping to push sustainability across the ENTIRE supply chain. Jancis received the award for her – and I find the way they’ve written this amusing – ‘environmental sensitivity, her belligerence against heavy bottles and for her numerous articles in the Financial Times and JancisRobinson.com related to sustainability in the wine sector.’ Cheers to belligerence against excessive carbon emissions!
Moving on to global headlines!
The truth about wine calories
On 30 May ‘The Licensing Letter’ ran a headline that said, ‘Forget Diet Soda: WeightWatchers Offers ‘Diet Wine’. Made in partnership with Traces wine brand from the DrinkWell group, it is the only wine that the weight-loss company endorses in the UK. And the wine has 78 calories per 125 ml …
This whole thing irks me. Wine is not a high-calorie beverage and you do not need to buy ‘diet wine’. Let me explain why.
Calories in wine come from two main places: alcohol and sugar. Carbohydrates in wine are very low.
Sugar is only really a consideration if you are buying dessert wines, which have high amounts of residual sugar, or some commercial wines, which may be made to capitalize on the fact that human beings are hardwired to like sugar. A couple examples of this would be Yellowtail’s Chardonnay which has 7 g/l of sugar and Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon at 9.2 g/l.
But let’s break that down: 9.2 g/l is 1.15 g per 125 ml serving. Sugar is 4 calories per gram. So that’s 4.6 calories from sugar in a 125-ml glass of commercial wine. And most artisanal production non-dessert wine doesn’t even contain any residual sugar.
So, as you may have guessed, most of wine’s calories come from alcohol. One gram of alcohol has 7 calories. And to calculate how many grams per serving, you’d take the alcohol percentage, let’s say 11%, which is what Traces is, which means 11 ml of alcohol per 100 ml volume, multiply it by 0.8 g/ml which is the density of alcohol, and multiply that by 7 calories per gram. So an 11% abv wine has about 61.6 calories from alcohol per 100-ml serving. Or 77 calories per 125-ml serving … which is pretty close to the 78 calories WeightWatchers is trumpeting with the Traces wine. Traces didn’t make diet wine. They made a low-alcohol dry wine. Which is what Txakoli is, or light, dry German Riesling, or Vinho Verde, or numerous rosés.
So please tell your family and friends: if they want fewer calories, just look at the alcohol percentage on the bottle and choose lower-alcohol wines. You don’t need to buy ‘diet’ wine.
Australia’s wine-industry struggles
The Australian wine industry’s struggles are something I’ve discussed on the news on 6 February, 18 May and 1 June (I’ll link those in the transcript). But to give you a very brief recap, of the top five largest wine companies in the country, four of them – Accolade, Australian Vintage, Pernod Ricard and Treasury – have made headlines in the last six months for either undergoing major corporate restructuring or for discussing selling off divisions. Most recently, Australian Vintage, the country’s third-largest wine company, was in discussions to be acquired by Accolade Wines when the deal fell through, their share price dropped and debt spiked, and they were granted a suspension of their shares on the Australian Stock Exchange to give them time to figure out how to proceed. The suspension ended Tuesday 11 June and the next day, The Drinks Business reported that the company had offered existing investors and financial institutions the opportunity to buy shares for a 42% discount on the price that their shares had been suspended at. They were hoping to raise AU$19.9 million. As of 13 June they had raised AU$15 million. Alongside AU$30 million in debt capacity from National Australia Bank, half of which is short-term and half carried through 2026, it seems the company has bought themselves a bit of time.
On 13 June it was also announced that the Australian government signed off on a AU$3.5 million support package for the Australian grape and wine industries.
Please pause for a second and consider the size of the Australian wine industry …
Australian Grape & Wine (AGW) – a national association of wine producers and grape-growers – estimates that in 2019 grape-growing, winemaking and wine-related tourism contributed AU$45.5 billion to the national economy – the equivalent of the entire GDP of Cambodia. And they’re being extended a support package worth 6% of the price of Tom Cruise’s house. Considering the size of the industry, the current challenges, and the massive changes that are needed, the AU$86 million dollar support package that the AWG requested earlier this year, which was ignored, hardly seemed excessive!
On the bright side, exports to China have picked up significantly since tariffs were lifted and in the last month AU$86 million of wine was exported to China.
RIP Warren Winiarski, Napa icon
On 7 June, Warren Winiarski, who founded Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley in 1970, passed away at the age of 95. California, and the US wine industry in general, owes so much to this man. Winiarski was responsible for the Cabernet Sauvignon that came top in Steven Spurrier’s 1976 Judgment of Paris – which pitted wines from the US against the best of France. This event not only raised the status of the US wine industry but also got people so interested in wine that Winiarski spent much of the rest of his life advocating to preserve Napa’s agricultural land. He and his wife Barbara donated over 200 acres (81 ha), including the famous Stag’s Leap Vineyard and Arcadia Vineyards, to the Land Trust of Napa County. The list of his accomplishments is far longer than I can fit into five minutes, but perhaps his most enduring gifts to the wine industry have been in the last decade. Before he entered the wine industry, Winiarski was a lecturer at the University of Chicago and his passion for education was a constant throughout his life. In 2018, he donated $3.3 million to build the world’s most comprehensive collection of wine writing in the world at the University of California, Davis – which actually includes quite a few of Jancis’s journals and papers. (See her article, 'How I cleared my attic.') In 2023 he launched the Spurrier-Winiarski Wine Writer-in-Residence Award – worth USD$50,000 for a three-month residency – to support the work individuals with a passion for wine communication. Cheers to Warren Winiarski!
This is a transcript of our weekly five-minute news broadcast, which you can watch below. You can also listen to it on The Wine News in 5 Podcast. If you have breaking news in your area, please email [email protected]. And if you enjoy this content and would like to see more like it, please subscribe to our site and our weekly newsletter.
