Why aren’t all wines vegan when they’re made with grapes?
It’s true, sometimes wine isn’t vegan but whether you’d still drink it or not depends on how strict your veganism is.
You see, all wines start off a bit cloudy with little particles floating around such as proteins, tannins or dead yeast cells. It’s just that what normally happens next is that the wine goes through a process to remove those bits and make the liquid clear and bright so it’s more commercially acceptable.
There are various ways to stop a wine being cloudy with many winemakers opting for a process called fining, where they run certain substances through the wine to help bind the particles together. Once this has happened, the combined particles either fall to the bottom of the tank or can be filtered out. Whatever substance has been used for the fining is then removed from the wine with the particles so that by the time the wine is bottled, there is little to no trace of it. Still, because there has been physical contact with the wine, it matters what was used.
Substances like bentonite clay or activated charcoal are vegan friendly and very effective for fining but in some places around the world, they still use old fashioned, animal-derived substances like albumin, which comes from eggs or isinglass, which comes from fish bones. Wines that have been fined with these can therefore not be considered vegan, even if though any trace is negligible.
No US, EU or British law requires producers to list fining agents (such as egg white, casein, or isinglass) unless they are still present in the final wine at detectable levels and could cause an allergic reaction.
The good news is that for quite a while now, many wineries have switched to the vegan-friendly alternatives. The challenge there is that not everyone wants the expense and paperwork associated with getting that word officially onto the label, so even if a wine doesn’t say it’s suitable for vegans on it, it might well still be vegan. A bit frustrating! It is absolutely something to be aware of and thankfully, it’s becoming much easier to find wines that are clearly labelled vegan than it used to be.
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