To many, wine may be something you haven’t considered to contain animal biproducts, because it’s just grapes, right? Actually, a large number of wines are made using animal derived products.
Like many things in our fast-paced world, wine making is a gradual process that we have sped-up to meet the demand. Traditionally the juice from the pressed grapes would be left to sit for a season to let the solids sink and gather as sediment. It’s also in this natural process that the wine’s flavour develops, and the colour and consistency will clear and start to look more like the finished product that we all recognise as wine. Wine labels that choose to follow this process may call their wine ‘natural’, ‘unfiltered’ or unfined’. At Commonsense we sell the Beautiful Chaos Natural White, which is delicious- if you can get past some natural floaties!
Fining is the technique that expedites this old process and this is also where the animal products come in. Animal by-products like casein, gelatine or egg whites are added to the wine which bind to the undesirable solids which are then filtered out together.
Animal derived fining:
Gelatin (protein derived from animal hide and bone), Isinglass (derived from the swim bladder of fish), chitosan (crustacean), blood and bone
Vegetarian fining:
Egg whites, casein (ingredient in cows milk)
Vegan fining:
Bentonite clay, pea protein, poly-vinyl-poly-pyrrolidone (plastic absorber)
Increasingly more wine makers are moving away from animal derived fining to appeal to a wider audience.
You don’t need to worry about drinking a vegan wine if you have, for example a dairy intolerance, because the animal products have been filtered out of the wine and therefore are not an ingredient. But if you follow a vegan diet or lifestyle and want to ensure that no animals are involved in the process of making your wine, then you’ll want a vegan wine.
Wines sold at Commonsense that state on the label to be vegan friendly:
- Lothlorien Wine (vegan certified by NZ Vegetarian Society)
- Bumblebee Wine
- Momo Wine
- No Evil Wine
- 27Seconds Wine
- Beautiful Chaos Wine
- Vivolino
- The Natural Wine co Wine
- Seresin Wine
- Sunset Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
- S-Low (Merlot Cabernet)
- Alberto Nani Prosecco (certified vegan by ICEA)
- Yalumba Shiraz
- Millton Chenin Blanc
- Crazy By Nature Cosmo Red
As with all labels in our stores, you’ll see a small ‘v’ on the top left hand corner of the shelf labels if a product is vegan.
