Vegan wines

A few days ago, I was choosing the theme and selecting the wines for a corporate wine tasting event we will be hosting in Leeds and suggested organic and vegan wines.The organizer, after a few seconds, asked me why vegan wines, were not all wines vegan since they are made with grapes?

When we wrote our olive oil guide, someone commented that olive oil should not be considered vegan due to the birds killed when picking olives at night. The person who wrote the comment read on a magazine that oil producers were picking the olives during the night and plenty of birds resting on the trees were being killed. Olives were and are picked at night as temperatures are cooler giving the producer a few extra hours to take the olives to the mill, cooler temperatures prevent crushed olives from fermenting in the boxes and producing a bad oil. Night picking is done by big, industrial, large oil producers, that have huge estate and pick everything.

Wine is made with grapes and being vegan doesn’t have anything to do with the flyers that get killed during the harvesting or pressing, otherwise there will be no vegan food; for a food product to be vegan, and a wine, the use of animal derivatives in the making process is prohibited, not only as ingredients, but also as additives or technological aids. For a wine to be vegan, the wine making process must be free from the use of any derivative of animal origin.

Animal origin derivatives, such as egg white or casein, are mainly used to filter or clarify the wine, the process by which insoluble substances suspended in the wine are removed - through the process, the wine is removed of its impurities and then bottled. Subsequently, the derivatives are eliminated by sedimentation at the bottom of the tank and removed and theoretically the wine should be completely free from them but still, wine makers that use them, cannot call their wine, vegan. Vegan wines and wine makers use non animal derivatives instead.

This post should clarify the difference between vegan and non vegan wines, but if you have any question, just get in touch.