Aren’t all wines vegan? Not really.
There you are, you and friends on a fall afternoon, gathered in a Napa Valley tasting room. You’re primed, pumped, ready to savor the world’s best Cabs, Chardonnays and maybe a Fume Blanc or two. As you swirl and sip, you focus all your brainpower on the wine terms you’re supposed to remember: malolactic, tannin, terroir. And the flavors you’re supposed to recognize: blackberry, mocha, tobacco leaf.
At this point, one of your friends pipes up to ask the person pouring behind the bar: “Do you have any vegan wines?”
Pause. You feel a moment of panic. You wonder if, this whole time, for centuries, the deep merlot color of the world’s red wines has been more a function of sheep’s blood than grape juice. Is animal testing a new wine variable you have to know? You’ve spent hours trying to memorize Robert Parker’s wine scores. Now you have to worry about Gwyneth Paltrow’s?
Kind of, yes. Here, in one of the most famous wine regions in the world, wines advertised as being meticulously absent of all animal products are becoming a thing. That’s good news for Napa visitors seeking vegan options that have previously been hard to identify.
“Veganism is not going away,” says Tonia Brow, a former real estate agent turned animal-rights advocate who runs the blog NapaValleyVegan. When she and her husband moved to Napa six years ago, Brow was disappointed by how few vegan-friendly food and wine options she found. Now, she says, that’s changing. “Now you can completely spend a whole day touring vegan-friendly wineries in Napa Valley.”
“What?! Isn’t All Wine Vegan?” is a tagline on Brow’s website. To most of us that seems like a good question. Wine is just grapes, right? Isn’t it automatically vegan?
It’s complicated. After wines have fermented, winemakers often depend on a practice called fining to remove impurities. In red wines, for instance, fining agents remove excess tannins. In white wines, they remove proteins that can make wine look cloudy. Traditionally, these fining agents have been made from animal products: egg whites for red wines and a derivative of fish bladders, called isinglass, for whites.
But a growing number of Napa wineries are foregoing animal-derived fining agents — whether to be vegan friendly or simply because they want to produce wines that are as natural as possible. Currently there are at least two dozen Napa Valley wineries, regularly open to the public, that pour wines that are vegan friendly, whether labeled as such or not.
For red wines, one alternative is using bentonite clay instead of egg whites. Or doing no fining at all. “It’s not necessary,” says Ivo Jeramaz, vice president of grape growing and winemaking at Grgich Hills Estate in Rutherford. “We want to make the best, most authentic wine. We grow grapes organically. We do everything to get grapes that you don’t have to add anything to.”
White wines are tougher: You’re less likely to find ones that don’t use fining agents, Brow says. Without them, “you’d get a dirty brown Chardonnay,” Jeramaz says. Still, some wineries have gone 100 percent vegan. O’Brien Winery fines none of its wines. All of Domaine Carneros’ sparkling wines are vegan friendly — you’ll even find the word “vegan” on the back label.
So, you there, sweating over animal testing in the tasting room, relax. You can devise a Napa Valley wine tour that will please vegans and non-vegans alike. You probably won’t even notice that the wines you’re enjoying are vegan-friendly. “Really, vegan wines are absolutely just as good,” Brow says. “You can never tell the difference.”