New Weight Watchers Wine Cuts The Calories—and Booze

If you, like us, partake of a glass of wine after work to unwind (and yeah, maybe catch a buzz), there's a new wine that promises a lower-cal sip. The catch? You'd have to drink more of it to get tipsy. Cense Wine, the recently debuted line of low-calorie wine, is the first such product endorsed by Weight Watchers International. At 85 calories per five-ounce glass compared to the average white wine's 120, it's billed as a diet wine for "living life to the fullest."

But if your version of "living life to the fullest" (Mom-speak for YOLO) includes getting reasonably tipsy off your two glasses of sauv blanc, take note: Cense clocks in at a moderate 9.6 percent alcohol by volume. That's a step down from the low-teens ABVs of typical white wines. Alcohol contains calories, so lowering the booze bar also lowers its calories. In Weight Watchers Points terms, Cense clocks in at three per glass compared to typical wine, which usually packs at least four points.

Winemakers at Truett Hurst, the company producing the Cense line, use a complex alcohol-filtering method to push both the ABV and calorie counts down. (Wine dorks and armchair booze scientists can read about the method in this Wine Spectator piece.) It joins Skinnygirl in the small but seemingly expanding low-cal wine space, though with a key difference. While Skinnygirl's labels will always broadcast your diet ambitions to the world, Cense's Weight Watchers sticker of approval peals off for more discreet dieters. The only sign you're drinking low-cal wine? You'll still be pretty sober after two glasses.