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Dessert and fortified wine

A 75 ml serving of dessert and fortified wine carries about 10.1 g of pure ethanol — 1.3 UK units, 0.7 US standard drinks, 0.8 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 112 kcal.

Never use this page to decide whether to drive. Clearance is an estimate from a simplified model and varies with your liver, your genetics, your medicines, food, sleep and illness — real elimination rates differ between people by a factor of two, and the model does not know which end you are at. The only safe level of alcohol for driving is none, and a legal limit is not a safety threshold. If you have been drinking, do not drive.

Wine17.0% (15.0-22.0%)USDA basis: Dessert wine

Dessert and fortified wines — port, sherry, madeira, sauternes, ice wine — are the only category on this page where both the ethanol and the sugar are high. Fortification adds spirit to arrest fermentation, which leaves the unfermented sugar in place and raises the strength at the same time. The USDA reference row shows both, and the difference from a dry table wine is obvious in the table below.

That combination is why the traditional serve is small. A 75 ml measure of a 17% wine carries roughly the ethanol of a small glass of table wine, and considerably more energy because of the sugar. Poured into an ordinary wine glass rather than a dessert glass, the same drink becomes something quite different.

These are also the wines most likely to be drunk after a full meal, which changes absorption. Food in the stomach slows gastric emptying and lowers the peak blood alcohol concentration for the same dose. That is a real effect and a poor safety strategy: it changes the shape of the curve, not the area under it, and the Widmark estimate on this page ignores it entirely because modelling it reliably is not possible from a web form.

Storage is the last practical difference. Because fortified wines are stabilised by their own alcohol, an opened bottle lasts weeks rather than days, so it tends to be drunk in small measures over a long period rather than finished in an evening. That is a genuinely different drinking pattern from table wine, and it is worth counting differently: a 75 ml measure twice a week is a very different weekly total from the same bottle emptied on a Saturday.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for Dessert wine — 13.7 g of carbohydrate (of which 7.8 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 75 ml of this serving. USDA values are per 100 grams and this page applies them per 100 millilitres. Beer, wine and cider are close enough to the density of water for that to cost a per cent or two; spirits are lighter, so for them the approximation is worth about five per cent.

As a cross-check, the same USDA row reports 160 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 120 kcal for this serving against the 112 kcal computed above — a gap of about 7%. Two independent routes to the same figure will not land on the same digit: the reference row was measured on one specific product at one specific strength, this page uses the strength you would find on a typical label, and the per-100-g to per-100-ml conversion costs a little more. Where the gap is large, the strength assumption is almost always the reason.

Source: USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy (public domain) — row: Dessert wine · checked 2026-09-02

What it costs in walking

This is an energy comparison and nothing more. Walking does not undo a drink: the ethanol still has to be metabolised, it is still prioritised over other fuels while it is in the system, and the effect it has on sleep that night is not cancelled by exercise the following morning. The number is here because it makes an abstract quantity concrete, not because it is a plan.

See brisk walking for where the MET value comes from, or the whole exercise library for other movements.

Source: 2011 Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al.) — MET value for brisk walking · checked 2026-09-02

How many reach a weekly guideline

The 112 g line is the UK Chief Medical Officers' 14 units a week, quoted here because it is the guideline most often referenced in English. It is not the only one and it is not necessarily the one that applies to you: national low-risk guidance differs between countries, is written in different unit sizes, and has been revised downward in several places in recent years. Look up the guideline where you live and convert it with the table above.

Source: UK Chief Medical Officers' low risk drinking guidelines — named example only · checked 2026-09-02

Clearance estimate

Read those hours as the earliest plausible figure under a set of assumptions that will not all hold for you. Absorption is treated as instantaneous, so the model starts the clock too early. Elimination is treated as a fixed 0.15 ‰ an hour, when published individual rates run from roughly 0.10 to 0.20 — at the slow end, the last column takes a third longer than it says. And the whole calculation is for one dose taken at one moment, not for three drinks spread across an evening, which is the situation that actually produces a morning-after problem.

Never use this page to decide whether to drive. Clearance is an estimate from a simplified model and varies with your liver, your genetics, your medicines, food, sleep and illness — real elimination rates differ between people by a factor of two, and the model does not know which end you are at. The only safe level of alcohol for driving is none, and a legal limit is not a safety threshold. If you have been drinking, do not drive.

The thing people get wrong

The glass. Poured like a table wine, a fortified wine delivers roughly double the ethanol per glass.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

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