This is a sponsored post, but all opinions are my own. For ages 21+.
I love hosting vegan potlucks with my girlfriends. I usually put together a colorful snack platter accompanied by some delicious wine. We recently celebrated one of my best friend’s birthdays with some Wente Morning Fog Chardonnay, which is also a vegan wine. One of the most surprising things I often tell my friends is that wine is not always vegan. I usually get a very confused reaction when I share this information.
I’ll start off by explaining how simple the wine production process is. You create juice from grapes, add some yeast, set it aside to ferment and that’s how easy it is to make wine. The wine requires quite a bit of time to settle since it will contain sediment from the grapes. In order to make the wine making process faster, some winemakers use a mixture of sticky animal ingredients to filter out the sediment – this is called fining.
ANIMAL-BASED FINING INGREDIENTS (source: vegan.com)
Isinglass (from fish bladders)
Gelatin (from boiled cow or pig body parts)
Albumin (egg whites)
Casein (animal milk protein)
There are winemakers that use vegan fining ingredients. Many will also just give the wine time to settle instead of using fining ingredients at all. The best place to check if your wine is vegan is Barnivore. The website has a huge database of researched vegan alcohol. So when you’re looking for some wine to grab for the next celebration, make sure to do some quick research because no one wants to support the exploitation of animals!
