As a vegan you become accustomed to checking the labels of everything you eat, drink, and wear and are always asking if something is vegan before letting it touch your lips. However one of the most difficult things to determine whether or not it is vegan is wine. You might ask what makes it not vegan? Well, some wines are clarified after fermentation and some of the ingredients used include:
– edible gelatins (made from bones)
– isinglass (made from the swim bladders of fish)
– casein and potassium caseinate (milk proteins)
– animal albumin (egg albumin and dried blood powder)
As we all know wines don’t usually have an ingredients list on the bottle (or box) as other products so we can’t just go to the market and pick up a bottle without doing a little research. A great site to find out which wines are vegan is http://www.barnivore.com/ – here you can find a list of wines, beers and liquors and details as to if they are vegan friendly, mostly vegan friendly or not vegan friendly. If you click the name it brings you further so you can find out if ones is “mostly vegan friendly” which specific wines are.
Some of my favorite vega
n wines are:
Bota Box wines- not only is it vegan but it is environmentally friendly with it’s recycled box UPDATE: as of January 2010 Bota Box is no longer vegan friendly for more info check out Barnivore
French Rabbit- another great variety of vegan wines that are also enclosed in environmentally friendly packaging
Fish Eye- great and cheap
Yellow Tail- ONLY reds are vegan- which is fine with me because I love red wine however my hubz and I usually go for one of the above brands if we are sharing as he is a white wine drinker.
Yellowtail Shiraz is my favorite b/c it’s cheap and I can buy it pretty much anywhere!! My hubby and I both drink red, so this is the one we always get.
Hey thanks so much for this. We are big red wine drinkers are always on the lookout for more good vegan wines. I didn’t know Yellow Tail was vegan! Super since it’s cheap and decent tasting!
Thanks for this information. I’m adding the wine and beer link to my blog!
Wow! I had no clue that there were Vegan Wines available. How cool! 🙂