Does Wine Have Sugar? Grams per Glass by Type

Yes, wine has sugar, but most dry wine has very little. USDA FoodData Central, the US government’s food composition database, lists about 1 gram in a 5-ounce glass of red or white table wine and about 8 grams in a 3.5-ounce glass of sweet dessert wine. The sugar is mostly what’s left of the grapes’ own sugar after fermentation. Here are the figures by type, where the sugar comes from and how to judge a bottle before you open it.

Note: This page gives nutrition and label facts only. It isn’t diet or medical advice. If you’re watching sugar for a health reason, ask your doctor or a registered dietitian.

How much sugar is in wine, by type

Bottle figures use USDA’s weight per fluid ounce and the 25.36 fluid ounces in a 750 ml bottle.

Wine (USDA entry)	Serving	Sugar per serving	Sugar per 750 ml
Red table wine	5 fl oz	About 0.9 g	About 4.6 g
White table wine	5 fl oz	About 1.4 g	About 7.2 g
Sparkling wine	5 fl oz	About 1.5 g	About 7.6 g
Rosé	5 fl oz	About 5.8 g	About 29.2 g
Sweet dessert wine	3.5 fl oz	About 8.0 g	Not calculated

These are averages for a style, not measurements of your bottle. USDA’s rosé entry stands out because it is well above its red and white entries. Rosés range from bone-dry to sweet, so we’d read that number as an average that a dry rosé may well beat. The dessert wine figure is for a much smaller glass, which makes its sugar per ounce far higher than any other row.

Our guide to low sugar wine uses the same USDA entries and names the driest styles.

Where the sugar comes from

Grapes are full of sugar, a mix of glucose and fructose, and yeast turns that sugar into alcohol during fermentation. Wine Folly defines residual sugar (RS) as the natural grape sugar left over when fermentation finishes, measured in grams per liter (g/L). Stop fermentation early, by chilling or filtering, and more sugar stays in the wine. That’s why some low-alcohol wines keep natural sweetness.

In a few cases, sugar is added:

• Sparkling wine. Most sparkling wine gets a small dose of sugar before it is corked, and the word on the label tells you how much (see the table below). Brut Nature has none added, according to the Comité Champagne, the Champagne region’s trade body.
• Chaptalization. Wine Folly explains that some places, including France and Germany, allow sugar to be added before or during fermentation. The yeast consumes it, so it raises the alcohol, not the sweetness.
• Flavored products. Wine Folly lists vermouth, sangria and some fruit-flavored wines among products with added sugar or flavoring.

Turning grams per liter into grams per glass

Producers usually state sugar in g/L, on a tech sheet rather than on the label. A 5-ounce glass is about 150 ml, so multiply by 0.15 to estimate the sugar in a glass. These are our calculations:

Residual sugar	Grams in a 150 ml glass
2 g/L	0.3 g
4 g/L	0.6 g
10 g/L	1.5 g
12 g/L	1.8 g
45 g/L	About 6.8 g
100 g/L	15 g

Wine Folly offers a similar shortcut: 10 g/L is 1% sweetness, and it comes to about 1.8 grams of carbohydrate in a 5-ounce glass. Wine Folly states that figure as carbohydrate, not sugar, and it is a little above our 1.5 grams. In USDA’s data, carbohydrates also run higher than sugars: our guide to how many carbs are in wine has that chart.

The sweetness scale on labels

Label terms give you a rough sugar range. For still wine, EU Regulation 2019/33 sets these limits:

Still wine term	Residual sugar
Dry	Up to 4 g/L, or up to 9 g/L if total acidity is no more than 2 g/L below the sugar
Medium dry	Above dry, up to 12 g/L, or up to 18 g/L if total acidity is no more than 10 g/L below the sugar
Medium (medium sweet)	Above medium dry, up to 45 g/L
Sweet	45 g/L or more

Sparkling wine has its own scale, and it surprises many people. These are the Comité Champagne’s ranges for Champagne:

Sparkling wine term	Sugar (g/L)
Brut Nature, Pas Dosé, Dosage Zéro	Under 3, no sugar added
Extra Brut	0 to 6
Brut	Under 12
Extra Dry	12 to 17
Sec	17 to 32
Demi-Sec	32 to 50
Doux	Over 50

So “Extra Dry” is sweeter than Brut. In our view, that’s the single most useful thing to remember in the sparkling aisle.

Sweetness vs. sugar

A wine’s taste isn’t a perfect guide to its sugar. Wine Folly says many grocery-store wines sold as dry have about 10 g/L of residual sugar, and that noticeably sweet wines start at about 35 g/L. Our guide to low sugar wine explains how acidity and bitterness can mask sweetness. We wouldn’t guess from flavor alone: if the number matters to you, look it up.

Alcohol can be a clue. A still white with low alcohol often has sugar left over, as our guide to low alcohol wine explains, while wines that say trocken, sec or secco point to a drier style. Our guide to how to read a wine label covers the other words you’ll see.

Is sugar where wine’s calories come from?

Mostly not, in a dry wine. In USDA’s red wine entry, a 5-ounce glass has about 125 calories and under 1 gram of sugar, and most of those calories come from alcohol. Sugar counts for more in sweet wines.

How to find the sugar in your bottle

1. Check for a sweetness term. Brut, Extra Brut, dry, sec, secco, seco and trocken all narrow it down.
2. Search for the tech sheet. Producers often list residual sugar in g/L on their websites. We’d start there for any wine you buy regularly.
3. Do the math. Multiply g/L by 0.15 for a rough figure per 5-ounce glass.

US labels on regular wine rarely state sugar, so these steps are usually the only way to get a number for a specific bottle. For more guides like this, browse Wine Basics.

Wine is for adults of legal drinking age (21 in the US). Please drink responsibly.