Low Carb Red Sangria Recipe

My low carb sangria recipe has the same beautiful color as regular sangria but only 3 carbs for a full 8 ounces. It’s sparkling and refreshing, just right for a summer evening, an end of summer party, and lazy afternoons on the porch swing. This low carb sangria recipe is for just one serving but you can easily multiply it to make a pitcher.

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For this recipe you’ll need: red wine, citron vodka, berry 0 carb water enhancer, club soda, ice, and a slice of lime for garnish.

If you are in a hurry click here to go straight to the low carb red sangria recipe.

I so love sangria in the summertime. Probably because it reminds me of the hot summer days and pitchers of icy Kool-Aid when I was a kid. It’s sort of the same when you think about it right?

I don’t know about you, but I wish summer was as magical for me now as it was when I was younger. Remember waking up on the first day of vacation with the whole summer stretching out in front of you? Remember that feeling that the days were never going to end? I had tons of free time to do everything on my list. This included riding bikes with my friends to wading into the ankle deep, icy water of the creek and catching crawdads. As long as I was in the house before the streetlights came on, I was free to play and romp outside.

Now a days, it seems like morning just turns into evening with no day in between! Where does time go?

As I write this, my kids’ summer vacation is coming to an end. They’ve had a busy summer this year with youth camp, visiting their father out of state, and two of them going on missions trips (one to San Antonio and one to Kenya, Africa). We didn’t get a family vacation this year because of the craziness of it all and I missed that a lot. My three youngest are the only ones left in school now, a senior, a freshman, and a 7th grader. I will miss them when they go back, too. The house is quiet. Too quiet.

All of this is to say that sangria and summer go together like peanut butter and jelly as far as I’m concerned. Sadly, sangria is full of carbs. First of all, it’s the wine in sangria has carbs. Red wine, white wine, they are all so tasty, but those carbs add up quick as do the glasses per sitting. Ha ! There’s not a lot of carbs (sugar) but your average glass of red wine for example has about 3.8 carbs for every 5 ounces you drink.

I don’t know about you but I can put down a lot of wine talking with friends on a Saturday afternoon. It goes down so smoothly. Next, there’s usually fruit juice in sangria, and often sugar as well. All of that adds up to roughly 18 to 20 carbs for an 8 ounce glass of sangria. You pretty much might as well dump vodka in cherry Kool-Aid. As good as that sounds, that is way too many carbs.

So, this summer I have been mostly staying very low carb. 5 days of weights and 4 days of cardio… well… maybe I can afford more than 15 or 20 grams per day. Anyway, staying low carb meant drinking co*cktails once in awhile instead of regular sangria more often. Let’s face it, you might be able to get away with a glass of sangria several times a week but when it’s a gin and tonic, maybe not so much?

More than a couple and people will start looking at you with funny. Even the dogs. Okay, maybe that’s just my dogs and people I hang with.

So, to make my low carb sangria I decided to try my secret for great keto co*cktails; sugar free water enhancers and some flavored vodka to mimic the super fruity flavor of my favorite red wine sangria. I added club soda to give it some sparkle AND to make it go farther. If you are using a very dry red wine ( I love the flavor of a Spanish Rioja) you might want to use sugar-free Sprite or ginger ale.

Yes, regular sangria has lots of sugar filled ingredients. Those are sliced/chopped pieces of fruit, sugar, simple syrup, even apple cider. While you can put a slice of fruit as a garnish, there is enough carbs in this keto sangria recipe from the wine alone.

Low Carb Red Sangria Recipe - Lowcarb-ology (5)

Here’s that low carb red sangria recipe. Cheers!