Doing Veganuary but not Dry January? Don’t forget to consider your wine

If you’ve chosen Veganuary over Dry January, remember not all wine is vegan. It can’t be, because dairy products are sometimes used when making wine.

And here’s why, because winemakers are trying to make the wine look good for us. We demand it.

Through the generations, we’ve adopted a culture where we expect our wines to look crystal-clear. If we see a nugget of unidentified matter or a hint of cloudiness, many of us declare it unfit for purpose. But those minuscule bits swirling around are just parts of the grape such as the skin or pip. They’re natural and harmless.

Even so, winemakers are usually required to make the wine acceptably clear, so they pass it through a filter before it’s bottled. But even the tiniest filter membrane can’t catch everything, so winemakers move on to fining the wine.

This is where animals come in – they supply many of the fining agents. Animal-derived substances are added to a wine to bind the loose pieces together, making them big enough to eventually filter out. Squeamish alert – we’re talking about fining agents such as fish bladders, bone marrow, gelatine, egg whites and casein (a milk protein).

Whether you’re vegan or not, the important thing to know is that we never ingest these substances because they’re completely removed before the wine is bottled. They don’t leave behind any flavour either but just the fact that they have come into contact with the wine renders them non-vegan.

But how do you guarantee it’s vegan? Here’s the good news. Winemakers have vegan-friendly fining agents at their disposal, such as a clay called bentonite.

More good news, winemakers could just skip the fining process altogether, which means if a wine says it’s ‘unfined’ on the label, we already know it’s vegan. This method doesn’t address people’s dislike of a hazy wine of course, but as we push harder against historical wine prejudices, more of us accept a cloudy wine to be non-faulty. Rightly so.

There are further clues pointing us to vegan wines, should we be looking. As well as searching for the word ‘unfined,’ we can look for a vegan logo on the label. Labelling a wine as vegan still isn’t law in the EU or the US, so you have to pay for certification and permission to use such a logo. However, not everyone wants to jump through this kind of form-filling hoop, so there are many wines out there that we don’t even realise are vegan.

That’s where stores and retailers can step in to help. They’re increasingly obliging with tools such as vegan search buttons and shelf markers keeping us on the vegan wine track, whether for a month or a lifetime.

Two non-hazy vegan wines to try

Curious Parallel Feteasca Neagra 2020 (£9.99)

A gutsy Romanian red with spices not too dissimilar to mulled wine.

Chateau Dereszla Tokaji Furmint 2019 (£11.99)

A comforting winter white. Nectarine juiciness plus crunchy fresh pear.

MORE : The Metro Wine Club: How cheap and cheerful meals can be elevated by the right wine

MORE : Five apps to help you go vegan this Veganuary