Vegan Wine Online
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What is Vegan Wine? Are All Wines Vegan Friendly?
Not all wines are vegan friendly. It’s weird, but it’s true. Wines are made from grapes, which is vegan friendly. But during winemaking, some Winemakers use animal products to help take out all the solids out the wines. This is why not all wines are vegan friendly. These days, Winemakers can use animal friendly products such as clay or activated charcoal to help remove these solids. This is how you get vegan friendly wines.
When is a wine vegan friendly?
When wine is being made, they crush the grapes to get the juice. When grape juice turn to alcohol, this is called fermentation – when the yeast from the grapes eats the sugar from the grapes, and this makes the wine have alcohol.
When the fermentation is finished, there are lots of solids in the wine, and these solids are called sediments. Sediments can be such things as dead yeast cells, grape pulps, grape skins,grape seeds, grape stems, and tanins from the grape skins.
Sediments form naturally, and are not harmful, and is a sign of a wine’s quality – but people don’t want to drink sediments in their wine, so Winemakers do their best to remove them. Removing the sediments is called clarification.
To clear the wines, the Winemakers can let the wine sit over time, and let all the sediments fall down over time and then filter it out the natural way. This takes a very long time.
To speed this clarification process up, Winemakers use fining products. Fining is where Winemakers use products to help remove all the sediments from the wines, leaving the wine to have that clear look. These solids are so small that Winemakers use products to help them all stick to each other, so they can be easier filtered out. Winemakers add the fining products on top of the wine, and as these fining products sink down, it attracts everything to it so everything sinks down faster. They then remove it out of the wine.
The fining products that the Winemakers use can be animal or non animal products.
A list of animal products that can be used in winemaking are milk protein (casein), animal protein (gelatin), fish bladder protein (isinglass), egg whites (albumen), crustacean shells (chitin or chitosan),
These fining products are used to filter everything out of the wine to give it a clear look. They use these fining products to attract everything into a ball, and they sink down faster and so they all get removed easier, including the fining products. Since everything gets removed, the Wineries don’t need to put what animal products they use with the fining process, as it’s not an additive to the wine, but it’s a removal process. That’s why you don’t see it on the wine labels. This is why some wines are not vegan friendly – Winemakers uses animal or fish products to help filter all the sentiments, These are animal based products, and are not vegan friendly at all.
These days, Winemakers can now use animal friendly products to do this filtering process. The vegan friendly way to do this is to use animal friendly fining products, such as clay based bentonite which removes the unwanted proteins. Activated charcoal is also good. These are natural ways to speed up the winemaking process.
To make vegan wine, Winemakers are now using natural products to do this filtering process. They can now use clay or activated charcoal, which are natural products, to help filter all the sentiments out of the wine. A list of animal friendly filtering products used in fining are carbon, bentonite clay (volcanic clay based filter), limestone, kaolin clay, plat casein, silica gel, and vegetable plaques. Winemakers can use these to filter out the wines instead of the animal products. This is how you can get vegan friendly wines.
So a wine is vegan friendly when the fining process uses animal friendly products, or the Winemakers just let the wine sit over time and filter out the sediments that way.
Why do Winemakers use animal products in the winemaking process?
To remove proteins, yeast, and other organic particles in the wine. People only want to drink wine, they don’t want to drink tiny particles in their wines.
When making wine, it has a lot of stuff in it. To remove these stuff, Winemakers sometimes use animal products.
What makes a wine non vegan?
It’s not the yeast. Yeast is natural from the grapes itself.
To make a wine non vegan, Winemakers use animal products when they remove all the sediments from the wine.
What makes a wine vegan friendly?
When no animal products are used during the winemaking process. This means the Winemakers uses animal friendly fining products to remove the sediments from the wine. Winemakers can even let the sediments fall down over time and then remove it – this process is called unfiltered or unfined wine. The unfiltered process sometimes leaves the tanins from the grape skin inside the wine. You can’t see it, but you’ll get the extra bitter taste from the wine. Some people prefer this extra tanins taste, so this is why there are so many different types of wines on the market.
Is organic wine suitable for Vegans?
The simple answer is no. An organic wine is when it’s produced without chemicals, fertilisers, pesticides or fungicides. It’s just all natural. It has nothing to do with non animal products. So technically, Winemakers can still use animal products in the fining process of making wines, and it’s still considered an organic wine, but it’s not vegan wine.
Can Vegans drink wine?
Yes! Just make sure it’s vegan friendly though!
Cautious about buying vegan wine online?
Yes you should always be cautious. Here at Vegan Wine Online store, we have all our wines vegan friendly. There’s a list that anyone can challenge a wine that’s not vegan friendly, and we’ll chase it up immediately. But all our wines are confirmed vegan friendly by many sources before we start putting it up for sale. If you have vegan friendly wines to request, or want to add vegan friendly wines to our list, then you can fill out the forms.
Where can I buy vegan wine online?
You can buy vegan wines here at Vegan Wine Online. All our wines are vegan friendly. As more and more people care about animal rights, Winemakers will start changing their wine making process and start finding alternatives to using animal products. There are already lots on the market. See our Vegan Wine List.