Vegan vino
What is vegan-friendly wine and how can you tell?
Vegan vino. Isn’t wine vegan-friendly anyway? How do animals even have a part in the winemaking process? It’s a good question and one that concerns a growing number of wine drinkers, vegan, vegetarian or not.
Wine is a vegetarian and vegan-friendly product because it is made from grapes, so how do animals feature?
The answer is all to do with appearances.
Most wine drinkers tend to like wines that look clear rather than cloudy and the quickest way to achieve this is to use fining agents to pick up floaty molecules in wine after fermentation.
Egg whites, dried blood, fish bladders, gelatin and milk-based casein have all been used as fining agents in wine. The dried blood has long since been outlawed by the EU but the rest are commonly used today. As are bentonite (a type of clay), peas and potatoes.
Paul Gordon, Leconfield chief winemaker
“We have taken the initiative to listen to the market and deliver clearly labelled vegan-friendly wines.”
So how does a vegan wine lover know what’s been in their wine, prior to it being bottled?
One answer is to buy specific brands, whose owners can guarantee no animal products were used in their production. These include some wines from Akarua, Astrolabe, Blackenbrook, Brightside, Yealands and any wine from Yalumba. Leconfield wines, another Australian brand with a growing number of vegan-friendly wines, is stipulating its vegan-friendly wines on its labels. As is the UK shopping chain, Marks & Spencer, which has its own range of wines, 70 per cent of which are now clearly labelled as vegan-friendly.
Insider tips aside, how does anyone know whether animal-based fining agents have been used in their favourite wine? Animal-based fining agents are used in wine not as additives but rather as processing agents. This means they are always removed but it is impossible to guarantee that miniscule traces don’t remain. Then there is the packaging.
“While some wines claim to be vegan, the other issue is that many people don’t think about packaging. Some screw tops and corks are made using animal-derived products. These effectively touch the wine while it is in the bottle,” says Leconfield chief winemaker Paul Gordon.
Gordon says it’s been worth taking the plunge into more transparent labelling at Leconfield.
“We have taken the initiative to listen to the market and deliver clearly labelled vegan-friendly wines. The response has been very positive from a sales perspective as we offer vegan-friendly wines across still and sparkling styles.
“In reality, the gentle way in which we produce our wines means that the amount of products we may choose to add is tiny and almost all is removed from wine as it clarifies. If a wine requires a little help to settle out the natural grape and yeast sediments formed in the winemaking process, we will use fining agents such as vegetable protein to aid that process.”
There’s no easy answer to the overall issue of making wines vegan, but there is massive growth in transparency in winemaking and labelling today.