How to Ensure the Wine in your Glass is Vegan!

We are proud to produce vegan wines and ensure that our bottles are always clearly labelled.

This year we saw over 500,000 people pledge to take part in the global campaign Veganuary, a 31-day challenge to consume only plant-based foods throughout January and hopefully beyond. Vegan diets are more on trend than ever before and we are loving this! Millennials are placing significantly more importance on ethical responsibility and health when making purchasing decisions than any other previous generation. However, before setting out to create Doe Eyed Queen, I remember being somewhat surprised to find out that not all wines are vegan! Following discussions at dinner parties, it quickly became apparent that a lot of friends were also unaware that a number of wines did not fit into a plant based diet.

Sparkling wine is fundamentally fermented grape juice, the sugars of the grape juice are transformed into alcohol through their interaction with yeasts, this makes it hard to imagine how a wine could possibly not be vegan. There is no difference in the grapes which are used to make ‘vegan wine’ and ‘standard wine’, it all comes down to the way in which the wine is clarified and to a process known as ‘fining’. Every wine, when first created, appears slightly clouded as it contains very small molecules such as phenolics, proteins and tartrates, although these do not effect the taste of the wines they do reduce the visual appearance of the wine, resulting in the wine appearing less clear, and as we know here at Doe Eyed Queen we like our wine to glow!

A combination of a desire to reduce production costs and market pressures often results in wine producers using fining agents to speed up the clarifying process and quickly remove these molecules. Insinglass (fish bladder protein), casein (milk protein), gelatine (animal protein) and albumin (egg whites) are some of the fining agents which are most widely used in the wine industry. Fining agents are negatively charged molecules they work by attracting the surrounding unwanted positively charged molecules towards them. This results in the unwanted molecules bonding to the fining agent, producing bigger particles as well as a reducing the number of particles, making these molecules much simpler to remove.

Here at Doe Eyed Queen, like other fine wine producers, we employ a minimalistic winemaking style and choose not to interfere to speed up our winemaking process. We wait for the small unwanted molecules to naturally dissolve out over time so that our wine self clarifies and stabilises, allowing it to develop in its own time rather than using fining agents. We are proud to produce vegan wines and ensure all our bottles are clearly labelled as ‘vegan’ on the back.

It is worth noting that it is still not a legal requirement for wine producers to include information on the fining agents that they use, so if you do follow a plant based diet and the wine you are purchasing is not clearly labelled as vegan you may want to do a little bit of extra research before pouring yourself a glass!