Vegan Wines

A few years ago, my brother and I began to get calls from people saying: "I am a vegan. Do you carry Vegan wines?”….We wondered: "What are they talking about? Do they know themselves?" So we asked: “What do you mean specifically? ” They answered with a vague: “Well, I mean that I don’t want to have anything to do with animal products or even with things made with the help of animal products”.

Well, as they say in the movies, that narrows it down some! But how did that apply to wines in general and ours in particular? What made a wine Vegetarian friendly or Vegan friendly? We had never thought of it that way.

So off went my brother Michel, our winemaker/ MD and import specialist, to get educated. For the record, both conventional and organic wine makers use 'animal products’ during production to clear or ‘fine’ the wine, to keep it from turning cloudy or to remove off tastes. Fining works by electrostatic attraction, if the element in the wine that needs to be removed has a negative charge, then a fining agent with a positive charge will be added. The fining agent acts as a magnet and collects the unwanted matter in the wines which sinks to the bottom of the tank. The then clear wine is racked or decanted off the sediment into a clean tank. Since the wine is finally filtered at the time of bottling no traces of the fining agents (made of long molecular chains) are left in the finished product. Fining agents of animal origin commonly used are egg whites, egg albumin, casein (milk protein), gelatin (derived from animal bones) and isinglass (derived from fish).

Thus we found that by strict Vegan standards (thou shall not expose thy body to anything that may imply that an animal was involved, much less suffered or was killed) typical wines, although only briefly exposed to “animal derived products”, still do use those and therefore do not qualify as vegan.

Well, on the face of it, this was discouraging. It looked like we would be able to fill the needs of the Vegetarian community but not of the growing Vegan community. What a shame!

But actually as it turned out, there was hope. We found out our from our friendly winemakers/suppliers in France that there were years in which instead of using the standard gelatin/casein etc.. listed above, they would actually use bentonite clay, diatomaceous earth, carbon and kaolin. Bingo! That was the solution and from then on we proudly listed a bunch of our wines as Vegan.

This led us to contribute wines to the PETA reunion in September 2006 and to make many friends in the Vegan community. If you are a Vegan, welcome!! Try us out and tell your friends...

All of our vegan wines are listed in a separate category on our wine list for your convenience. We carry a selection of organic/vegan red, white, sparkling and dessert wines, as well as offer a Vegan 3-bottle SAMPLER. Browse our selection online or call us at toll free: 1-888-326-9463. If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to e-mail us at: info@theorganicwinecompany.com.