We love when customers contact us with questions about our wines.  If we don’t know the answers off-hand, it prompts us to geek-out on research, which is truly one of our favorite pastimes!

We’ve received several questions from customers lately asking if our wines are Keto-friendly.  While we’re familiar with the Keto diet as a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet that lowers blood sugar and insulin levels, and boosts the body’s metabolism, we wanted to learn more about why Frey wines qualify as Keto-friendly.

Practitioners of the Keto diet aim to keep the body in the blissful metabolic state called ketosis, where the body is actually burning up stored fat.  Due to their carb content, many alcoholic beverages can throw you out of ketosis.  Wine and light varieties of beer are relatively low in carbs, usually 3-4 grams per serving, but when you’re trying to clock under 30 carbs per day on the Keto diet, even a glass of wine could launch you out of ketosis.

So where do the carbs in wine come from in the first place?  Carbs in alcohol come from residual sugar, or sugars left over after the fermentation process.  Before grapes ferment into wine, they are sugary.  During fermentation in the cellar, tiny yeasts feast on grape sugar and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.  As the alcohol level rises it kills off the yeast, and any remaining sugar becomes known as residual sugar.  In some cases, a winemaker might desire more residual sugar in order to manipulate a wine’s acidity and will stop the process to prevent the yeast from consuming all the sugar.  In other cases, a winemaker might add sugar to ultimately increase the alcohol level in a process called chaptalization, although this technique is prohibited in California.

Because of the presence of sugar, whether residual or added, even wines that are classified as “dry” can still bring on the carbs.  Varieties with higher alcohol levels, typically Petite Sirah, Syrah, and Zinfandel, will naturally harbor more carbs.  Although wine labels don’t list nutritional information like calories and carbs, if you know the residual sugar in grams per liter, you can do the sum on your own.  To calculate carbs per 5 oz. serving of wine, multiply the residual sugar by 0.15.  Dry wines are classified as wines with 30 grams/liter or less of residual sugar, so one glass of dry wine can contain between 0-4 carbs.

At Frey Vineyards, we allow the yeast to go through the full maturation process in the cellar and we produce our wines with very little manipulation.  ALL of our wines test for less than 1% residual sugar, which means they all contain less than 0.15 carbohydrates per 5 oz. glass.  So Keto friends can rest assured that our wines are low-carb and can be enjoyed while enjoying your fitness plan!