Last week I wrote about the Vegan 100, a list of 100 vegan items that every vegan should try (note: the list was compiled by Hannah Kaminsky, author of My Sweet Vegan
What, wine might not be vegan? For those of you who haven’t already heard, alcohol is often refined using animal products. Here’s the scoop on wine:
While wine is essentially made from grapes, on occasion animal products are used in small amounts in the production process. Wineries might use animal-derived products as finings. To remove proteins, yeasts, and other organic particles which are in suspension during the making of the wine, a fining agent is added to the top of the vat. As it sinks down, the particles adhere to the agent, and are carried out of suspension. None of the fining agent remains in the finished product sold in the bottle, and not all wines are fined. All Kosher wines are vegan.
Examples of animal products used as finings are gelatin, isinglass, chitosan, casein and egg albumen. Bull’s blood is also used in some Mediterranean countries but is not allowed in the U.S. or France.
As an alternative to the animal products Bentonite, a natural, inert clay powder, can be used to clarify the wine. There are even some very patient vintners who let the wine’s sediments settle naturally. Winemakers are not required to put on their label which clarifier is used, since it is removed from the final product. However, some wine makers will boast on the wine label that their wine is unfiltered, because some wine connoisseurs prefer wine to be unfiltered.
Source: Wikipedia
Anyway, we have been invited to a few dinners over the next several weeks. For most of the dinners Jane will be preparing a dish, but one of the hosts has asked us to bring a bottle of wine. Rather than go out to the store and just hope for the best, I thought I’d do a bit of research to see if I could compile a list of vegan wines. No need, the Vegan Wine Guide had done that for me. Their list currently contains 428 wines, and you can even search by country, and/or type (color) wine. So, if you’re a strict vegan who likes to drink wine, you might want to visit, this list can definitely make your life a bit easier.
Great information. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Yukiko,
I’m glad you found this valuable. :)
Here are a few sources I’ve found for vegan wines: Foursight Wines in Anderson Valley (www.foursightwines.com) – although not advertised, all the wines this family makes from their vineyard are vegan. Frey also makes vegan wines which can be quite good (www.freyvineyards.com).
“All kosher wines are vegan” is patently wrong. You will see as is discussed at length on kosher wines dot com that fish and egg products ate in fact used by some kosher wine producers:
“What Every Vegan & Vegetarian Should Know About Wine
Winemaking is not for the faint of heart, especially when it comes to considering the unusual ingredients that have been used in the fining process. It might surprise vegan and vegetarian wine lovers to know that traditionally, animal products have been used to create clear sediment-free wines and several are still in use today.
Fining is the process that winemakers use to remove any visible floating particles that might make the wine look cloudy or hazy and to help stabilize the wine. They are usually added to the barrel or tank following fermentation where they collect or absorb the unwanted particles and fall to the bottom as a sediment. There are different types of fining agents depending on what type of wine is being made.
Some fining agents are fairly innocuous like bentonite which is a type of clay, while others can cause real headaches for vegetarians and vegans. These more dubious fining agents include casein or milk protein, egg whites, fish bladders, ox blood, and animal-derived gelatin.
Interestingly, wineries are not required to list these animal-based additives on their labels since the fining agents fall to the bottom of the tank or barrel and are filtered out of the wine. It is also not a requirement for wines to be labelled with whether they are vegan or vegetarian or not. However, animal-derived fining agents is still problematic for those with moral objections to the use and consumption of any animal products.
Luckily for drinkers of kosher wines, due to the restrictions of the kosher diet and careful control in wineries crafting kosher wines these animal-derived fining agents are never used in the production process.
Is Kosher Wine Vegan?
Most Kosher wines are vegetarian. Kosher wines will never use animal derived fining agents, except for fish gelatin or egg whites, which may be used in some kosher wines. Kosher wines using fish gelatin or egg whites are not considered vegan and not included on our list of vegan wines.”
Please ammend your post as it makes some assumptions that are easy to make but are actually not fact-based and can cause people to inadvertently buy wines that are made using animal products, even if they are removed and filtered out.
https://www.kosherwine.com/vegan-wines.html
(BTW, your form won’t accept my double last name!)
Patience Rojas-Taylor