Vegan wine: Aren't all wines vegan? | Small Victories Wine Co

Vegan wine: Aren’t all wines vegan?

Tomorrow, 1 November, is World Vegan Day so what better time to talk vegan wine!

There are ever increasing numbers of people moving to a vegan diet – where no animal products are consumed. The choice to be vegan may be in relation to climate concerns, health concerns or animal welfare, and vegan consumers want to know their food and drinks are vegan friendly.

Small Victories Wine Co proudly produces wines that are suitable for a vegan diet.

But aren’t all wines vegan?

After all, wine is made from grapes and yeast that do their thing to turn the sugars into alcohol. So you could definitely be forgiven for assuming that wine is vegan friendly.

In some cases though, animal products are used in the making of some wines.

Traditional techniques for ‘fining’ a wine (which is removing any floating sediments that might remain from the winemaking process as they make the wine cloudy) include using fining agents which derive from eggs, milk or fish. The protein based fining agents act like magnets and the floating sediments stick to the proteins making larger bundles that can be filtered out of the wine before bottling.

In many cases, winemakers now use vegan alternatives such as pea protein or clay-based products as fining agents or they may choose to just leave the sediment to sink on its own.

Are wines labelled as vegan?

It can be tricky to tell if a wine has used fining agents in their winemaking, as it’s not a requirement to be listed on the label in all countries. So in many cases you’ll need to do some research.

Wineries that are producing vegan friendly wines are starting to label them as such, to help consumers easily find a wine they can enjoy. Many wineries will also include information on their website if you’re not sure looking at a label.

Or if a wine is labelled as unfined then you know that no fining agents have been used during the winemaking process.

Vegan wine and food matches

Once you’ve found your new fave vegan wine, you might want to know what the best food pairing is. To make it easy for you, we’ve written a blog on vegan food matches with pairing suggestions for each of our wines.

To whet your appetite, here are a couple of examples:

For a vegan food match for our Vermentino make a burrito/nourish bowl with all your favourite ingredients – think brown rice, kidney/black beans, roasted sweet potato or pumpkin, corn salsa, cashew cream, lettuce and avocado. Then put a huge squeeze of lemon on the burrito bowl to enhance all the flavours.

And you might be surprised, but our Small Victories Shiraz will pair well with a chunk of your favourite vegan chocolate for a delicious after dinner treat!

Small Victories Vermentino vegan wine with food match nourish bowl on dining table

Buying vegan wines online

All Small Victories wines are vegan, so you can be confident purchasing our wines if you are looking for vegan wines for yourself or for a gift or even for your next dinner party!