Vegan vintage adds variety

A Marlborough wine company has just given wine-loving vegans a little more variety.

A bold move, you might think, but for a gluten-intolerant winemaker with a vegan brother and a vegetarian mother, it was more of a ‘‘why not?’’ moment. Well, when you’re getting almost weekly requests for vegan wine, then, yeah, why not?

But hold on, what’s non-vegan about wine? Well, it’s all in the fining process.

Allan Scott Family Winemakers chief winemaker Bruce Abbott said the fining process, to make it less dry and bitter, often used agents derived from egg whites, fish, milk and blood. Fining basically removed ‘‘things the winemaker doesn’t think works . . . or finds is making the palate a bit angular or tannic’’, Abbott said.

‘‘It just seems to me that there is a bit of a movement towards people trying to be more aware of what they put in their bodies, and a lot of people moving towards being vegan. We really were only using gelatin as a fining agent in the process so essentially we’ve just removed that. It makes life a little bit more difficult . . . but it’s not a massive hassle really.

‘‘There’s many vegan-friendly products on offer which do the same job . . . and will actually just mask those things we’re trying to hide, maybe smooth them out on the palate so that we’re not actually removing anything from the wine. It was kind of a natural progression for us, because we’re moving away from fining our wines.’’

The fining process involved ‘‘stripping things out of wine’’ and instead Allan Scott Family Winemakers was looking at techniques to ‘‘add’’ to the wine, he said. ‘‘I’m not vegan so it’s not something I’ve actively gone looking for, I just thought if we could do it, why not?’’.

And the move wasn’t just for the 2018 vintage. ‘‘This is what we’ll do from now on; I don’t think we really need to use animal products,’’ he said.