Why is some wine not vegan?
Is wine vegan? While there are plenty of vegan-friendly wines available to buy in the UK, there are a number of brands and products that are made using animal-derived ingredients.
Discovering food and drink that’s unexpectedly unsuitable for our diet is a process pretty much all vegans go through at the start of the transition, and wine is a notable example of this.
The fact that wine - which is made from grapes and at first glance seems straightforward and obviously vegan - can be made using animal-derived ingredients can often come as a shock to both vegans and non-vegans alike.
To make things more confusing, many wine brands haven’t got the memo on how beneficial widespread labelling of their products as vegan-friendly could be for their sales in an increasingly plant-based market.
While a growing number of brands and supermarkets in the UK are starting to wake up to the fact that veganism is quickly on the rise, it’s still pretty unusual for the average bottle to be marked as such.
But why is some wine not vegan? Here’s your need-to-know on how and why animal-derived products are used in the production of some wines.
Why is wine not vegan?
The reason why some wine isn’t vegan is to do with how it’s filtered during the winemaking process.
After the sugars in the grapes are fermented and turned into alcohol, the resulting liquid is often cloudy in appearance due to the fact that it’s full of substances including proteins, tartrates, phenolics, and tannins.
While these are perfectly harmless and wine is fine to drink in this state, supermarkets and buyers generally demand that the product is clear and free from this cloudiness. To bring clarity to it, the wine is filtered using ‘fining agents’, which essentially act as magnets to attract the molecules and easily remove them.
These fining agents are often non-vegan, meaning wine can be made using animal-derived products.
According to PETA, non-vegan fining agents used by winemakers include the following:
Blood and bone marrow
Chitin (fibre from crustacean shells)
Casein (milk protein)
Egg albumen (derived from egg whites)
Fish oil
Isinglass (gelatin from fish bladder membranes).
Gelatin (protein from boiling animal parts)
Does wine contain animal products?
The wine itself doesn’t contain these products as an ingredient, and the fining agents are removed after the filtering process. However, small traces of them can still be present in some wines after it’s been filtered.
How is vegan wine made?
There is some good news - there are plenty of vegan wines available on the mainstream market, and an increasing number of winemakers are choosing non-animal derived fining agents to make their wines.
Examples of vegan fining agents are as follows:
Carbon
Bentonite clay
Kaolin clay
Limestone
Silica gel
Plant casein
Vegetable plaques
What’s more, with increasing demand for organic and biodynamic wine, some isn’t filtered at all, meaning that no filtering agents are used.
Wines can self-fine, and there are a number of brands that allow them to do this without the use of fining agents. These are easier to spot than those made with vegan fining agents, as they are often labelled as Unfined/Unfiltered on the bottle.
How can you find vegan wine in the UK?
Winemakers do not tend to list the fining agents on their bottles, meaning there is often no way of knowing whether they were vegan-friendly or not just by looking at the bottle. If you’re picking up a bottle at a normal supermarket, you may need to do some extensive research of the wine company to work out if they’ve used non-vegan fining agents in their winemaking process.
Fortunately, however, the wine industry is increasingly waking up to the fact that there are a huge number of wine-loving vegans, and wines labelled as vegan-friendly are becoming more prevalent in UK shops.
Finding information online on vegan-friendly alcoholic drinks
There is plenty of information online for anyone in any doubt about whether a brand of wine, beer or other alcoholic drink is vegan or not. However, one website brings it all together and has become the ‘go to’ resource for all things vegan alcohol: Barnivore.com. The Barnivore database currently has vegan information on more than 54,000 beers, wines and spirits. While it may not list all those trendy microbrewery craft beers you hipsters love so much, it covers all the mainstream drinks and is always worth checking.
Read more: Why isn’t honey vegan?
Polly Foreman is a writer and digital journalist based in London. Since going vegan in 2014, Polly has stood firmly against all forms of animal oppression and exploitation. She is passionate about tackling misconceptions of veganism and challenging accepted norms about the way we use animals in this country.
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