vegan wine

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 vegan 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.