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White wine

A 150 ml serving of white wine carries about 14.2 g of pure ethanol — 1.8 UK units, 1.0 US standard drinks, 1.2 Estonian/Finnish units — and roughly 115 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.

Wine12.0% (10.5-14.0%)USDA basis: White wine

White wine is where pour size does all the damage. A restaurant small glass is 125 ml, a standard glass is 175 ml, and a large glass is 250 ml — a third of a bottle. Poured at home into whatever glass is clean, the "one glass" people record is frequently 200 ml or more. Across that range the ethanol in a single serving roughly doubles without anyone changing what they drink.

Strength has drifted upward too. Wines that would have been 11% a few decades ago are commonly 13% now, driven by riper fruit and warmer growing seasons. That is a quarter more alcohol per millilitre than the mental model many people are still using, and it compounds with the pour size rather than averaging out against it.

The residual sugar in a dry white is genuinely small — the USDA reference row shows a couple of grams per hundred millilitres — so nearly all the energy is ethanol. That is why "dry white wine has fewer calories" is only true relative to sweet styles, and not by much: the alcohol is the calories, and the alcohol is why you are drinking it.

One practical consequence of all that: with wine, the only reliable way to know what you drank is to track the bottle rather than the glass. A standard 750 ml bottle at 12.5% is a fixed, knowable quantity of ethanol, and dividing it by the number of people who shared it gives a better answer than anyone's memory of how many glasses they had. Spritzing with soda water lowers the strength of what is in the glass, which changes the pace but not the total in the bottle.

By serving size

What the strength range does

Where the calories come from

The carbohydrate figure below is the USDA FoodData Central row for White wine — 2.6 g of carbohydrate (of which 1.0 g sugars) per 100 g — applied to 150 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 82 kcal per 100 g, which scales to about 123 kcal for this serving against the 115 kcal computed above — a gap of about 6%. 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: White 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 pour. Measure your own glass once with water and a kitchen scale; most people are pouring more than they think.

Frequently asked questions

Other drinks

All drinks and the calculator · Exercise library · Daily calorie needs · Sleep calculator