Drink Clean-Crafted Wine
If you eat healthy, you might as well drink healthy!
If you are trying to eat clean and reduce the amount of chemicals and preservatives you put in your body, you might as well drink wine without added chemicals and no added sugar. I know alcohol is a poison and it's bad for your body, but life is all about moderation and balance. I don't think it's realistic to tell someone to never have a drink again when they are trying to eat healthy and lose weight. So if you are going to drink, it should be clean-crafted wine!
What is clean-crafted wine?
Glad you asked! Clean-crafted wine is wine with ZERO of the 250 commonly used, FDA-approved additives that can change the taste, smell, color, and texture of the wine. Wine that doesn't have ANY sugar added during bottling, and sulfite levels are less than normal.
Grapes natural flavor, colors and lifespan almost vary across vines, which makes capturing and establishing sameness very difficult. The addition of pesticides, chemical additives and sugars provide a way for producers to get around the natural unpredictability and promote wine that tastes the same, bottle after bottle, year after year. This also made it possible to hide flaws that may exist in those bottles, like bacteria and other unpleasant elements. Clean wine is grown naturally, distinctive each year, and tended by actual people without all the additives.
10 Features of Clean-Crafted Wine
- Grown naturally with no synthetic pesticides
- Sustainable organic and/or biodynamic farming methods
- Most harvested from old growth vines
- Delicious and always distinctive year after year
- Tended by actual people and not mass produced by industrial agricultural methods
- Vinified by hand not manufactured in a lab
- Zero grams of sugar (the average mass produced wine has up to 16 grams of sugar added)
- Zero added chemicals (FDA allows up to 250 additives to be added to wine like ferrocyanide, ammonium phosphate, copper sulfate, mega purple, GMO ingredients, just to name a few)
- Slow crafted to extract naturally occurring antioxidants
- Low Sulfites usually less than 50ppm (FDA allows from 250-350 ppm of sulfites)
I was introduced to Scout and Cellar's clean-crafted wines and these are by far my favorite. They test the wine in a lab to make sure they meet the standards of clean wine listed above. Check out their wine selection and I promise you will be thanking me 🙂
How much sugar is in Scout and Cellar's clean-crafted wine?
Scout and Cellar lab tests all their wines to makes sure they are completely clean (free of pesticides, no additives, no added sugar/sweetener, and low sulfites). The lab reports will also calculate how much sugar is in each bottle of clean-crafted wine. So if you are watching your sugar intake, you can click on each wine and it will tell you exactly how much residual sugar is in each bottle. This way you know for sure, exactly!
The Wine Process
5 Steps to Wine Making
1. Harvesting
Harvesting is the first step in the wine making process and an important part of ensuring delicious wine. Grapes are the only fruit that have the necessary acids, esters, and tannins to consistently make natural and stable wine.
2. Crushing and Pressing
After the grapes are sorted, they are ready to be de-stemmed and crushed. For many years, men and women did this manually by stomping the grapes with their feet. Nowadays, most wine makers perform this mechanically.
3. Fermentation
After crushing and pressing, fermentation comes into play. Must (or juice from grapes) can begin fermenting naturally within 6-12 hours when aided with wild yeasts in the air.
Fermentation continues until all of the sugar is converted into alcohol and dry wine is produced. To create a sweet wine, wine makers will sometimes stop the process before all of the sugar is converted. Fermentation can take anywhere from 10 days to one month or more.
4. Clarification
Once fermentation is complete, clarification begins. Clarification is the process in which solids such as dead yeast cells, tannins, and proteins are removed. Wine is transferred or “racked”into a different vessel such as an oak barrel or a stainless steel tank. Wine can then be clarified through fining or filtration. Fining occurs when substances are added to the wine to clarify it.
5. Aging and Bottling
Aging and bottling is the final stage of the wine making process. A wine maker has two options: bottle the wine right away or give the wine additional aging. Further aging can be done in the bottles, stainless steel tanks, or oak barrels.
How do they make clean-crafted wine?
Clean-crafted wine is vinified in organic and/or biodynamic farms. Biodynamic is similar to organic farming in that both take place without synthetic chemicals, but biodynamic farming incorporates ideas about a vineyard as an entire ecosystem, and also takes into account things such as astrological influences and lunar cycles. The winemaker does not make the wine with any common manipulations such as yeast additions or acidity adjustments. Biodynamic grape growers treat the vineyard, including the soil, plants, animals (wild and domesticated), people, microbial life and cosmos, as an interconnected, ecological whole. No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides are permitted. It takes 3 years of biodynamic farming to earn a Demeter USA Certification. It takes 3 years of organic farming to earn grape certification from the USDA National Organic Program, and costs vary.
Most mass produced wines use synthetic pesticides which have chemicals when growing the grapes. They are sprayed on the vines and used in the soil. A wine that is certified organic has been tested to show they are not using any synthetic pesticides when growing.
8 Week Weight Loss Program
Download my FREE eBook and follow my 8 week program to lose weight while counting macros, eating clean food, and still enjoy a glass of clean wine! You will receive emails along the way to help you achieve your goals.