You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Alisha Barrett, Wine Educator at Binny's, and I'm joined today by Gabriel Z, our Wine Manager in Lincoln Park. Gabe, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. And Pat. Pat, good to see you. Hey, nice to be here. And Chris calling in remotely. Hi. I feel very remote as usual. For those of you that have been in our stores recently, reading the news or shopping for any kind of beer, wine, or spirits lately, you can see this Better For You movement, this Wellness Movement that is catching on like wildfire. And so we're going to explore these so-called low calorie or kind of healthy wines that are hitting our shelves or picking up a lot of them. And we're going to take a closer look at for today. It's an industry that has nearly doubled in volume in just 2020. So these Better For You wines are all the rage, especially with the younger generations, I would say. And we're here to take a look at their marketing, taste their wine, actually disclose what the calories, carbs and sugar content of these wines are, and give you our honest thoughts. Finally, finally, finally, a wine podcast. I can get behind the light beer episode of wine podcasts. Is this something you're going to turn on the next time you're like jazzercising? You just need something to tune out the sweat to? Not only do I not exercise, I don't jazzercise. You can supplement all of that by drinking lower calories. I do 16 ounce arm curls of liquid gold. Do you smooth jazzercise though? That's the real jazzercise. That's how you know you got a glass of white wine in front of you. That's right. No hard bop for you. Gabriel, you're obviously, you're in the store more than any of us and kind of hearing from customers about this. What's your take? What are you hearing? What are questions that are being asked about these low-cal wines? The course of the past few years has been really difficult to navigate because there's a lot of misinformation that's been coming around. because the whole category is bullsh**? Well, because social media is trash and you have eight words to get across a point that may, you know. So you have people coming up with you this like just random catchphrases and taglines of like, this is going to make myself healthier and not true. Is clean wine a thing now? Do people use that? It's a thing. The first I heard of this was actually, because we all remember what like the NA category was. Yeah. It's so different now. Now it's absolutely exploded. There's spirits in that category. Oh yeah. We sell a ton of them. And it was only a matter of time because if you look at the American style of drinking, it's like we're throwing back everything in the fridge tonight, nothing's left over. Like we're a binging country as opposed to say European drinking culture. So it was only a matter of time before people started looking at. Healthier options and lower alcohol options. Yeah, and I think that's especially true of Millennials and more so of Gen Z that are much more conscious about what is in their food and drink and are drinking less and yeah, looking for lower alcohol products. But alcohol is calories. So calling it low calorie is a bunch of bull, right? Well, these are also low alcohol wines. Okay, so they truly are like wines. Some of them are and we're going to talk. Ones that aren't then aren't low calorie. They can only be so low calorie if they contain alcohol. So I'm approaching this with some skepticism. There's a fascinating marketing side to all of this. Well, it's also how people get their information about all products, but specifically wine. Five, 10 years ago, it was the periodicals. You had to wait until enthusiasts wrote about something for you to really get the scoop on a new trend, which now fitness has gone so far and away from what it used to be years ago, from seeing an infomercial or a Bowflex, to now there's people that have their entire careers based around just sharing what they do to work out, what they eat, and then also what they drink. That's exactly how so many young folks are getting all of their information. Like, I should be eating quinoa, and I should be doing a thousand sit-ups a day. Our kids are getting their information from people who are professionally good-looking, but not good-looking enough to be professional moms. Yes, just pitching. Yes, and behind all these wines is very clever marketing, and we'll do our best to describe some of the labels to you. But just because you put a runner on the front of your wine label does not necessarily mean the wine is healthy or will help you in your training. It's surprising that the government even allows showing action like that on a label. That used to be pretty verboten. Really? Even showing the picture? I mean, it's very hard verboten to make any kind of health claims, any kind of wellness claim, any kind of beneficial claim around alcohol. Even where I've had suppliers on our Monday and Wednesday night live tasting Zooms, we're talking about vermouth or something as a digestive. He's like, well, I can't say that. You guys do what you want, but I'd get in a lot of trouble if somebody saw this and saw me say vermouth as a digestive. I was like, you got to relax, man. There's not a task force arresting people who say vermouth helps my stomach after a big meal. Let's get into the wines and then we'll kind of break down wine production and kind of what's going on to make these low calorie. All right, which one you plan on having first here? That's the sound you want from your wine. The full scent or not. What are we starting with? We're going to start soft. We have the Kim Crawford Illuminate, 70 en blanc out of Marlborough, New Zealand. This is their, as Gabriel said, Illuminate, owned by Constellation. About 70 calories per serving. because it's half the alcohol. Yeah. I think it's particularly interesting to focus on some of these products where there's a direct corollary from the same producer. If we're looking at the fit vine, you can't really do that. But when we're looking at KJ or Kim Crawford, you can see whatever relative benefits there may or may not be more clearly. Yeah. What's unique about this one to the other three we're going to taste, is how they actually achieve this low alcohol, and what they do, and I'll let Chris, our scientist here, maybe elaborate on it. But they use spinning cone technology, and they take 60 percent of the wine, and put it through this low vacuum distillation to reduce the alcohol down to about 1 percent or just below. The same way they make non-alcoholic stuff, same technology. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, low vacuum. So, yeah. I'll let Chris explain. The way this works is it's a cold distillation process. So, if you remove the pressure in the chamber, that means things will evaporate more easily. It lowers the boil temperature. So, if you distill in a vacuum still, a normal still, water boils at 212 degrees, but a vacuum still, in a vacuum, I want to say it's like 148 or something, Chris. Something around there. You can really lower it down. If you've ever done any high elevation cooking, you know that the boiling point of water, like if you're up in the Rocky Mountains, the boiling point of water is completely different than it is at sea level, because the air pressure is lower. I mean, who hasn't done high elevation cooking? The interesting thing about the spinning cone is though, as opposed to some of the earlier technology for de-alcoholizing, is that the way it works, okay, you have this vacuum environment, and then the product flows over the series of cone-shaped pieces of metal in a very, very thin layer, and it allows all the volatile stuff to evaporate really easily at low temperature. The first thing that comes off are a lot of the aromatics, the really delicate stuff that you could lose using another process. But here, you can capture them and then put them back into the wine. So first go those aromatics, then goes the alcohol, and then you can rebuild it any way you want, once you have the constituent parts. So basically, for anyone that believes any of these wines are low manipulation wine, that's clearly not the case because they're heavily handed in terms of their winemaking. But if they were to remove all this alcohol, the wine would have obviously no body, kind of no viscosity, no texture to it. And so they do that for 60% and then they blend back in 40% of kind of your regular wine, if you will. Unfortunately, New Zealand's 70 & Blanc doesn't have much body to give. It could definitely tone down the aromatics. Well, I mean, this honestly, this kind of smells a bit toned down versus some recent Sauvignon Blancs we've tasted on the podcast. But it's far from a flat line. It still comes out of a glass. It's still obviously a Sauvignon Blanc. I mean, it's fruity, it's ripe, it's melony, it's citrusy. Very much so. There's certainly a little bit of pyrazine showing through, a little green herbaceousness. It's not terribly atypical of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. There's some scientific evidence that your perception of aroma and flavor changes pretty radically with just a few percentage points. It could actually be enhanced by being lower alcohol or not. I once talked to this guy who had owned a winery, who was prior to that a food scientist. He came up with, I'm just going to make this up, but the flavors for fruity pebbles or something like that. He was like a corporate chemist who played with flavor all the time. He said that he would dial in his alcohol level either up or down to make the wine taste the way you wanted it to. It was a really interesting conversation. But something might taste one way at 12.5 and completely different at 13.5, same exact wine. So it's not necessarily a direct correlation between high or low alcohol. But it does make a change. I will say this wine's a bit, you know, it's expectedly thin. And it's got a pretty nothing finish to it. Not that the finish on a Sauvignon Blanc is going to light the world on fire to begin with. But this tastes like this is the Bud Light to Kim Crawford's Bud Heavy. It sure seems that way. Very much so. I agree that the aromatics are a little bit toned down than what you might normally expect from a Marlboro Sauvignon Blanc, but they're definitely still true to the character of Sauvignon Blanc. So it's identifiable as a varietal. But then on the palate, I think, is where you get let down in terms of by the time it reaches your mid palate, it really falls off. The finish is quite short. And it just tastes like if you were to somehow blend a diluted lemon juice and grapefruit juice together. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's just like diluted fruit juice is kind of. Yeah. Let's just point out that the acid is incredibly crisp in this. And there was something to say there. Yeah. Yeah. There's no sugar to support what little fruit there is. So even in a typical dry Sauvignon Blanc, you're going to have a little bit of residual sugar and it really enhances the flavor of the fruits. just a little bit will do a lot. So here, we're working completely without it. So it's pretty neutral and yeah, it finishes short. Yeah. I mean, do you think they're removing any residual sugar out of this, right? Yeah. just through well attenuated fermentation. Really? I believe. What's the stats on this? Do we know how much sugar is in a serving, I suppose? So I don't know if you have different facts than I do, but the US Department of Agriculture will say that a five ounce glass of red table wine will have in and around 0.9 grams of total sugar. So to say that this is, I mean, every site that I looked at, all of these wines we're looking at today advertise somewhere below one gram. So it's pretty standard. Well, yeah. I think we got to be clear about this. This is not a radical departure from a standard dry wine. Not at all. As far as sugars or total carbohydrates go, it's really they're saving the calories and the lack of alcohol here. So in total, this Illuminate Sauvignon Blanc from Kim Crawford is 70 calories, is 7% alcohol, and 3 grams of carbs. They did not disclose the grams of sugar, but that is what I found as well, Gabriel, that they're all telling you it's below one gram per glass. But again, that is pretty standard for red wine. Some white wines tend to be like 1.4 grams or so, but again, heavily dependent on the producer and the wine on that. And I guess from a consumer standpoint, you have to wonder if you're looking to drop some calories in your life or lose some weight or something like that, your sugar content in general is something to consider. But I mean, we're being told by the American Heart Association to have no more than 25 grams of sugar daily. It's actually more for women, but not by most. What do those guys know? Yeah, 25 grams of sugar. I mean, my cup of coffee already nailed that. I'm done. How much sugar you put in your coffee? There's 25 grams of sugar in a bag of flaming hot Funyuns. He's getting one small coffee with cream and sugar from Dunkin Donuts every day. Exactly. Exactly. So that's where you start your day thinking, like, I can keep my cup of coffee. I just really got to trim it in my alcohol consumption. If you have a glass or two of white wine at the end of the night, you got to look in other places. You're not going to see any difference. I would agree that the margins here are very small, that you're cutting out, whether it be calories or sugar. So yeah, definitely something to call into question. However, let's just loop back. This is crisp. It is refreshing. It is true to its varietal. It's on the shelf for $12.99 and has been incredibly popular as we attested to with limited supply right now. This isn't terrible. This is not terrible. It's not offensive. Certainly easy to pound on a super hot day. It might save you a headache in the long run. It might, just because the alcohol is lower. All the better reason, buy two because you're going to want that second one. Well, let's get into that a little bit actually. Let's think about this. If this is 70 calories a glass and you normally have two glasses of wine at 120 calories, I guess you can slip an extra glass in if you want. To me, whatever happened to the concept of a little moderation and drinking something really delicious. I'd rather have one glass of something great than three of something mediocre, personally. I think there's also some to be said for the caloric and mental stress of your body trying to perform sit-ups after a bottle and a half of wine. I mean, try it. You're going to reach similar physically speaking. I will say, Chris, you can have it both ways with liquid gold, ham's beard. You can have lots and low calories. Could not resist. That is absolutely true. It's enough calories to sustain a wild bear, but not too much. You can't hibernate on it. All right, the next line coming around is from Kendall Jackson. This is their Avant Chardonnay. The one and only KJax. A rebirth, right, of their Avant Chardonnay that was un-oaked, that didn't really catch on, right? Yeah, well, lower calorie Chardonnay. Thank you. Actually, I'm glad they listed it as such. Lower, not low. What's low, really? Yeah, that's actually a good point. Let's recognize that there are no kind of regulations around the actual figures that you need to qualify for, low calorie or low sugar or low alcohol. I've kind of agreed within the industry that low alcohol is below 10% or so, but again, nothing legal about any of this. It's like session beer. It means something different in England than it does here. And now with craft beer, they're like, oh, it's less than 7% alcohol. That's a session beer. I like this, that they did this with the label. Kudos to them. They have a little graph, and Kendall Jackson Avant en Oc Chardonnay, Kendall Jackson Avant Lower Calorie Chardonnay with a comparison between the two. So we're at 13.5% versus 9% alcohol, 124 versus 85 calories. That's quite the calorie drop, considering it's only 4.5% alcohol. It's like 40 calories. Yeah, well, it's true. That's like 40% of the alcohol, that's true. Never mind. This is a math podcast now, by the way. Four versus three grams carbs. And what do you know? Neither have any fat or protein in them. What the hell is that? See, as a category, I am genuinely shocked that wine doesn't have some sort of protein supplement in it yet, because everything has protein in it now. You can buy the protein version of everything from your car's tires to whatever. Yeah, Joey was buying protein-added filtered milk at the gas station on the way back from Kentucky yesterday. just eat a normal meal, guy. He's got to get those gains. I will point out that Avant en Oat Chardonnay, I guess still on the market, and this lower calorie one, but note that this actually is oat, so it does see some oak on this. I think they're trying to emulate the standard KJ and flavor profile. I don't know why they chose to go with the Avant name though. I think this wine smells like crap. This has an aroma of some weird peppercorn cleaning product. Peppercorn cleaning product, huh? Pledge? No, he is for sure referencing some bong cleaner that you can only get at a head shop. Low calorie. Dude, I can't have- That's just the smell of your resin, man. Chris, what do you smell in this wine? because it smells quite musky. The most striking thing to me, and I've already tasted it, usually I linger on the aroma longer, but is the transition between how it starts, it's very, very bright and acidic, and then it just turns into this butterscotch-y thing on the finish. The transition is slightly startling to my palate. It's weird. Yeah. It's important that you point that out, and it's actually not surprising that we're picking up on this disjointed palate, because how they make this wine compared to our spinning cone technology with Illuminate is they're picking some fruit super early. obviously, as grapes ripen on the vine, they are gaining sugar and they're losing acidity. So by picking earlier, we're getting less sugar in the grapes, that's lower alcohol in our finished wine. So they're going to pick some of the fruit earlier, and then they'll go ahead and pick some fruit at full ripeness, and they'll then blend the wines that those create. So to your point, we're getting really tart, high acid, linear in the front, and then the back end is those fully ripe grapes coming through, giving us the rounder, richer, buttery, butterscotch flavor profile. Yeah. So I've got a lot to say about this. I find this somewhat fascinating. From a consumer standpoint, I think I would appreciate the fact that they're not- I think it smells like old Belgian beer, like oxidized, like multi Belgian beer. I don't know what I'm smelling. There's a fake sweet note on there that is, yeah, it's multi. Why do I love old Belgian beer so much? You're making me question my sanity. I don't know. I was just drinking some old-ass Belgian beer a couple of days ago, like real old stuff. Maybe I'm still smelling that. It's like caught in my olfactory cavity. Stuck in your craw. That explanation of how they blend the underripe and fully ripe grapes is interesting. And I did a little looking into this, and it was bugging the hell out of me because I was trying to do some calculations to figure out how you could just do that and come up with 9% alcohol. And I found it to be virtually impossible. And it took a lot of digging, but I finally figured out they're also using a spinning cone here too. Which is, I find to be a little bit, I don't know, everything you read, all the press releases, even this website, make it sound like it's simply this blending process, and they end up with 9% alcohol. But you'd have to be so far into like Champagne, Vong Clare territory, as far as levels of ripeness go. I mean, really, really screaming high acidity and almost 8%, 7% potential alcohol. And then you blend in the ripe grapes. What proportion of ripe grapes? I mean, I was coming up with like 10%, 15% at the most, you could get in there to keep it at 9. But yeah, it's spinning cone too. Yeah, and with that much acidity, I mean, it certainly wouldn't be that K. Jack's profile, as Gabe said. Well, it doesn't have that profile. Tasting this is kind of disappointing because nothing about that tastes like Chardonnay. Yeah. It doesn't really even taste like wine. Yeah. I told you, it tastes like stale old Belgian beer, or it smells like that. I don't know what it tastes like. Could you spritz this with the hams? You think that would help? Yeah, I could get behind the Illuminate, but this would be very difficult to consume. First one was much better. I think oxygen is actually hurting it more than it does most things. This brings us to the broader question of why are we buying these wines if we're buying them, when ironically in the modern wine market and modern wine world, ABVs have just been ticking up over the years to various things, trends and climate change. I'm probably old enough, I am old enough to remember 12% ABV Bordeaux being pretty normal or 12.5. If you look at AOC regulations, the minimum amount of alcohol to be in a lot of AOCs is 9, 9.5, 10%. That will tell you something about how little sugar was sometimes produced. But now, you're in Bordeaux, you get 14, 14.5, sometimes over 15. It's just trending that way. Back in the day, these wines already existed just by their nature, and now, we're seeking out something branded that way. Whereas, you could go by a bottle of Chablis, maybe at 12.5% still. It's going to be bone dry, it's going to have not a ton of alcohol, and the calorie count is not going to be that much different. Look at Côte du Gascogne, like Domaine de Puy, it's like 10% or 10.5% naturally. It tastes like real wine. It's crisp and good and inexpensive. So this thing already exists without the marketing. It's just marketing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look at- That was a long explanation, I know. That was really good. Yeah. I think we could just end on that actually. I mean, look at your white wines from, say, Trebbiano in Italy. Look at muscadet from the Malone grape variety. As you mentioned, Pickpool, all of these are naturally lower in alcohol, and thus will have fewer calories, but are still made with traditional winemaking and made to, frankly, taste good. So just because they don't cover their label with, again, slim design and low-cal and all of that, they shouldn't be discounted. So ask wine consultants about what they recommend on that. So true. You're right to point out Italian whites. I mean, very moderate in a lot of cases. And even if you can come up with a Trojan cabinet from Germany or something, the alcohol is going to be under 11 percent and dry. Sure. Most definitely. Dry Rieslings from Alsos typically come in at about 11 and a half. We should taste those instead of these. I feel really good about the next one. What is the next one? It's a cupcake, but with a handful of blood thinners, so really. Hearts are light. Wait, we really do have a light wine from the brand Cupcake? Yes, they're actually, they're doing this, we're going to taste the rosé here in a second, but they have a Pinot Grigio, a Chardonnay, and a Pinot Noir, all a part of this lighthearted line that they've released, and they are owned by the Wine Group, Wow. It is very popular, 80 calories, 8% alcohol, 3.7 grams of carbs, so really no departure from standard on the carbs. Talk about an ironically named wine. Who goes into the cupcake shop and buys the sugar-free ones? No one. Nobody's sane, at least. Well, I think it's interesting. I think we've already beat to death on how they may or may not be able to make this wine low calorie. Going back to the marketing, what I think is fascinating about Cupcake is that they are directly marketing against this product against hard seltzer, not full-syn wine, hard seltzer, as well, you're naturally going to be going to this category as your low calorie alternative. Here is an alternative to that. This smells like just as much fake strawberry as you would get in a strawberry hard seltzer. This smells like just really immensely watered-down strawberry jam, but like good strawberry jam, like more of a natural strawberry, but it's just like so watered down and there's nothing else there. It's super bright and crisp and lean too. I mean, there's just a totally linear approach to this and super crisp acidity. To steal a quote from Ron Swanson, this is water lying about being wine. Yeah, there's some kind of watermelon, Jolly Rancher thing going on on the palate as well. Can we all agree that I think all of these have had the impression of wine on the front, absolutely zero mid palate, and the finish just has like this pop of acidity that may or may not be real. This does have a refreshing acidity on the finish. I'll give it that. I just decided I'm going to develop a wine-like meo product where you just spritz a little flavor in a glass of water. That's truly low calorie. Don't they do that with like absinthe at bars? They just put in a little aromatizer or whatever it is, a little spray bottle, just to give the essence. Atomizer. Atomizer. That's the one. Thank you. I'm just going to do that with a bottle of Bordeaux. just psst, psst all day. I don't have much to say about this wine. I liked the strawberry jam comment and the Jolly Rancher and just- That's it. You nailed it. This cupcake light-hearted rosé is on the shelf for $9.99. It costs more than the regular cupcake. Isn't regular cupcake like seven bucks or my dream in this? Well, that's what many commentators have pointed out in this category, that despite it being lower in calorie and lower in alcohol and all this stuff, they were selling these at premium prices. because Chris pointed out that it's harder to make. Yeah, it is. It's a lot more effort running that spinning cone. Yeah, nothing natural about these wines. I want to point that out. Yeah, this one tastes like strawberry lemonade without any sugar, period. Crystal light. Yeah. I wish I had more to say about this, but there's literally nothing here in this wine. There's just nothing. The one thing I would say is, I wouldn't feel bad about putting these on the rocks and just knocking them back outside and it's 90 degrees out. I would. Put these in my camelback. I would. Speaking of, I would put this over the rocks, spike it with a bit of Aperol, and maybe top it off with something bubbly, and then I wouldn't have to taste whatever's going on here, and I'd have a still refreshing cocktail. Yeah. Right. Well, my plan is to dump a bunch of brandy and sugar in them, and fruit, and have a nice sangria later, totally defeating the purpose of all of these wines. Let's move on from this cupcake. It did just launch last summer. As I mentioned earlier. This is the lightest one yet. They sold 100,000 cases in the first six months. Wow. Kim Crawford was seven. Oh, okay. Kim Crawford was still the best one. Agreed. Yeah. All right, one more contender. Yeah, this fit fine. This guy's got a glass in one hand and a pineapple in the other, and he's jogging. Who jogs with a pineapple? I mean, if you really wanna lose calories. If you really wanna lose skin. 14.1, everyone. 14.1% alcohol? We're all staying here tonight. This is not right, then. There's no way, I bet this has the same as everything else. This is the most fascinating marketing concept out of all of them. Chris, you wanna know how great they are at marketing? They're using gluten-free grapes. Whoa. I can't write. Gluten-free grapes. Get out of here. That's why it's so amazing that people don't put fat-free on wines, too. because, you know, you engage in BS like that, where there's no reason for there to be gluten in your wine to begin with, and then you market it. I mean, you know, corn chips do it, too, you know. Maybe it's just for people who don't have any idea what might contain gluten or not. I don't know, but it seems to be a fad. This wine clearly hasn't had much done to it to make it seem anything different. Like, it's just regular wine, how wine is normally made. Yeah, 100% marketing. They've just found the right words to use. We crush grapes, you crush life. I even saw on their website, I think they have a limited edition Zinfandel out that's like 15% alcohol. If you're looking for a wine that champions the way you want to live your life, crushing it at work, at the gym and at home with the family, drink with us. Here's a quote directly from their Instagram page. Urbana S writes, the red blend is so bomb diggity, it has an amazing taste, like out of the world. seriously, I recommend. Bomb diggity. It's the bomb diggity. When was that written? Like 1987? It was posted on May 21st. 1987. This is a gross green pepper bomb vegetal cabernet. This is gross. All they're bringing to the table, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I actually think this is a really good thing, is some degree of transparency about what your wine contains. There are no unlike food, there are no rules about having calorie counts or nutritional information on a bottle of wine, but they're pretty late to the party. Randall Graham of Bonnie Doon is trying to push this decades ago, and he put all of his ingredients and everything on his bottles. Oh, sure. Whether they were flattering or not. Transparency is the thing here, but there's nothing different or special about these wines. It's just designed to make you think there is. Yeah, this is up at 117 calories, unsurprising, given the 14.1% alcohol in this Cabernet. So really no different. The average glass of wine has about 120 calories. It's like, yeah, it's just 40 calories more than the other quote unquote light wines. Yep. Also has 3.9 grams of carbs, and they say that their extended fermentation reduces sugar. Oh, so they ferment it drier. It lowers sulfites, histamines, and tannins, and basically they're doing an extended fermentation, just like winemakers in Europe have always done, and many do. So really nothing new here, but they were ahead of the game. They launched back in 2015 and got into retail in 2017, and have just figured out how to portray this lifestyle, even though the wine itself is really not healthier at all. Can we talk about how gross it is though? Why is it so gross? because it's a cheap cab. How cheap is this? $14.99. That's not cheap. Not cheap enough. What they pay for the grapes is probably cheap. I don't know. That's bad. This is a weird alcoholic burn in the finish. It's definitely burns. The green pepper character is blown off a bit, but the funny thing is we've had this bottle of cab sitting here open on the table the whole time we've been recording. We treated it like a cab we actually want to drink and let it air out a bit, and it's gross. Yeah. The fruit condition also is very cooked, very jammy, which is interesting given that you are picking up some purezines. Oftentimes that's kind of a that's vegetable note is coming through with the kind of underripeness, but the fruit is certainly nice and ripe. I just cut mine with a little bit of this light hearted rose. It tastes like a triple berry like. Ooh, let me try that. Dragon fruit thing. It's actually great. One thing producers of wines like this could do is, and what I'm assuming they're doing is picking yeast strain. They're certainly not using ambient yeast. That just is efficient and works hard, so you get a well attenuated wine. Conversely, you could lower alcohol by picking an inefficient yeast strain that doesn't convert sugar to alcohol as cleanly. This wine is not really interesting. And I agree with what you said. It does totally taste like some vitamin water flavor when you mix it with the low Cal rose. But what a gross cabernet. No thanks. What about it's just a bunch of marketing nonsense. Get out of here, fit fine. I also want to point out that a lot of these brands are saying that they have far fewer sugars, you know, in their wine. And when you compare to some kind of big brands that Americans love that have eight, nine, ten grams per liter of residual sugar, those wineries are adding that sugar to appeal to our palates, to add that kind of velvety texture, that kind of richness and viscosity that you expect. And many of you will probably know some of these brands that we're referring to. But when you compare it to kind of traditional wine making and how wine has been made over the years, and they're not adding sugar back in. And so just because it may have fewer sugars than some of these more kind of modern Americanized kind of wine profiles, doesn't mean that all wine has a lot of sugar. Most wines on our shelves are fermented dry. There might be some small trace amounts of sugar that are, you know, those are unfermentable. But by no means are they going to kind of kill your diet. Right. They're absolutely not wrong in pointing that out. And I would just say that Fitvine in particular compares their wines to like the 10 top selling brands in the category, which means we're talking about like 10, $12 bottles of wine that are aimed at a customer who wants some very rich, slightly sweet Something like Maomi that's loaded with Mega Purple or something? Yeah, exactly. Well, Maomi, Apothec Red, those kind of bigger brands, there's sugar in there. That's what makes it appealing to people. Yeah, there's sugar added. But you buy a Shinan or something like that, it's going to be 12, 12.5% alcohol in some cases, and bone dry. They're out there. You don't have to have a runner on the label. Yeah. Well, I'm not a fan. We've just tasted four of these lower calorie wines. I still don't know what Fitvine calls itself, because it's not in low calorie and it's not alcohol, but it's just They're too busy crushing grapes and life to deal with questions from you. All right. It's crushing life. But I would say of them, if I had to have one tonight, the Kim Crawford Illuminae. Kim Crawford wasn't bad. Kim Crawford was not bad. Check back for that one. The rest can go scratch. Yeah. Ironically, the lowest ABV and probably one of the more manipulated ones, so go figure. Do we have any other low-cal wine brands that we should mention that you're not going to make me taste today? Brandcott, Flightsong. Yeah. That was also an early pick as well on our stores. Boda Box just released the Boda Breeze. That's in a three-liter bag in a box. Line price, I think, with the rest of their brand, which is nice. Another OG, Bellissima. Speaking of good marketing with a face behind it, Christie Brinkley's Prosecco, quote unquote. She's been putting zero sugar on her label since the beginning. I just read today, not in our stores yet because it was just announced, but Francia is coming out. I saw that. Yeah, I read that too. Yes. Well, this is obviously a trend with critical mass. For those of us with critical mass who want to lose them. Yes. Actually, just coming into our stores very soon here, towards the end of June, will be Yellowtail's Pure Bright. Several different varietals. Punishment for making me taste these is we have to do a light beer podcast next. I'm not talking like craft light beer like Roger is going to want to do. I'm talking light beer, light beer. Macro beers? Yeah. Macro light beer. We're doing that. My dad will love it. So delicious. We should go grab one right now. Yeah, I know. I'm leaving here and grabbing one right now. Forget this stuff. We hope this conversation and tasting shed some light on these lower calorie wines in our stores and helps you navigate this kind of new marketing trend. It's a marketing trend, it's not a wine making trend. It's a marketing trend aimed at the wellness crowd. Wellness crowd, please shop at Binny's. We don't care what you buy, as long as you buy it from us. It's a step in the direction of people not drinking anymore is what it's gonna be. I'd probably rather refrain than have this stuff. Yeah, instead of driving to the liquor store, walk. There you go. Carry your own case to the car. Real solutions here from Gabe Z. All right, I think we do have a question that's been submitted. That brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast, where you send us a question on some social media of your choice or comments at binnys.com. We are at Binny's Bev on social media, and if we answer your question, we give you $20 in Binny's Fun Bucks. So just ask us a question. Our question today comes from Matthew Welge. I'm not sure. He emailed us at comments at binnys.com, and he says, I'm really enjoying the podcast. Oh, thanks, dude, and learning something new with every episode. No, thanks to me, I'm sure. My question has to do with tequila. I've discovered that there are a lot of good quality tequila bottles out there, but most of the general public seems to be stuck on either budget constraints or the myths around their quote unquote college years and preconceived ideas of what good Speaking of marketing. What role can you guys play between the customers that need education and the distributors that want to push the popular items? Thanks and keep up the great work, Matt. We can like Dikembe Mutombo, slap bottles out of people's hands in the aisle if they're picking up tequila. We and our staff promote 100 percent agave tequila as always. That's the first thing we teach our staff when we're doing tequila classes and tequila trainings with the staff is the first and foremost, only ever recommend a 100 percent agave tequila. From there, we try to recommend brands from producers that we know and trust, and we really like additive free brands. So producers like the La Altana Distillery, Carlos Camarena's brands, his brother Felipe's brands, even Patrone. If you're looking for a mild tasting tequila, at least is 100 percent agave and additive free. So they're not adding any kind of sweetener on the back, or any kind of mouthfeel enhancer type of thing. I mentioned Carlos Camarena. We've got a few brands from La Altana. We just got Via Lobos, actually, which is one of the brands we didn't have for quite a while. El Tesoro is the big brand from La Altana, and we do some single barrels of that and stuff. So what can we do to try to promote better tequila? Well, just being us on the sales floor, I guess. We do our best to train our employees to be experts in good quality tequila, and they certainly do their best to pass along to customers. But again, outside of just taking bottles out of people's hands of Cuervo and sousa, there's not a lot we can do otherwise except to recommend better stuff. Well, that's also what makes us great. We got to keep offering the selection. Check out our YouTube channel. We did a whole bunch of virtual tastings with tequila and agave spirits, where we really get into the weeds of better tequila production, additive-free tequila production, bat-friendly agave farming, things like that. Those are all things we can do to not only drink better tequila, but help the industry as a whole. Yeah. I think you just got to get all your friends to listen to Barrel to Bottle, number one, because we address these things all the time, and to watch those 800-week series of agave spirit. Yeah. The Breton Friends agave hour. They went on for months at a time. If you miss those, and you want to know about agave spirits. You're having trouble sleeping. I also think, Pat, I don't think people realize that it's not only allowed, but how common it is to add sugar or aspartame. Unbelievably common. I mean, some of our best-selling, most popular tequilas are just loaded with aspartame. When in doubt, ask a friendly Binny's spirits consultant because they can certainly guide you in the right direction. You can always email spirits at binnys.com. That goes directly to myself, Brett, and Joey, and somebody will always get back to you with a good recommendation. If it's Pat, it will be snarky. Yeah, it might be. Matt, thanks man. Thank you for the question. Well thought out question. 20 bucks coming your way. You don't get bonus bucks for such a wordy question though. So if you have a question again, send it to us. We'd appreciate it. And while you're busy tapping on those keys, bothering us with a question, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks guys. Thank you. Gabe, thanks for coming out. Of course. Making the trip. I'd say this was fun, but it wasn't. So, light macro lagers next. You're going to preach about having people buy good tequila and talk about how bad this wine is just to go have a hams tonight. Yeah, because hams is great. All right. Yeah, we're done. So these wines largely stank, but Kim Crawford, pretty good. If you want lower calorie wine, drink half glasses of wine. Till next week. I'm Pat. I'm Alisha. I'm Chris. And I'm Gabe. Keep tasting. We're also here with Pat. Pat, good to see you. Hey, nice to be here. And today we are dining- Wait, we have someone else here. Oh, sorry Chris. Chris is here over Zoom, and Alicia is just pretending he's not here. Six inches from the right side of her face staring at her. Hey Chris, it's nice to have you. That's okay. I'm used to being ignored. It's nothing new for me. I'm so sorry. Till next week, I'm Pat. I'm Alicia. I'm going home. Say keep drinking. Keep drinking. Screw you guys. Keep tasting. Oh Chris. The invisible guy in the corner. Let's do it again. Okay. No respect, I tell you.