When is wine not vegan?

Lost in translation: This article was originally written in German. The translation is likely to be stilted.

Wine is not vegan if it has come into contact with ingredients of animal origin, or involves animal labour.

But what exactly does that mean? What kind of contact?

What are these "ingredients"? Isn't wine a truly pure product made only from fresh grapes? The answer to that last question is a resounding yes. Unfortunately, there are some winemakers who use concentrated grape juice to change the colour of their wine. Fortunately recent laws require that this information be declared in the label. And so it is, hidden behind a QR code. None of the wines that you find at rotweiss contain anything other than wine made from fresh grapes.

However, most wines are clarified.

“Clarification” briefly explained

The aim of any wine clarification is to remove particles in the wine that can cloud it or make it biologically unstable.

This means that substances are added to the wine and then removed from the wine. The aim is always to keep the wine free of clarification residues. The clarifying agent is added to the wine, binds cloudy substances and ultimately falls to the bottom of the tank. The wine is then completely separated from the clarifying agent either by decanting or filtering. The wine is free of residue, the sludge is gone and the wine is limpid.

What are these clarification agents?

a) Substances of animal origin

b) Substances of non-animal origin

Why use vegan clarification agents?

Every clarification aid has its justification. Those of animal origin are technically no better, only six thousand years old. There is no reason to use them.

If you leave them out, any wine can be declared vegan. "Making" wine vegan is still a challenge. Managing flocculation with vegan agents is not for beginners.

About vegans and veganism

First of all: I am not vegan. I don't need to explain this any further. You know what that means. But I recognize veganism as a philosophy and consider myself a student of philosophy.

Veganism challenges us to think. Anyone who does not examine their decisions when dealing with food, people, animals and the environment is acting negligently. Omitting something is hardly a sacrifice when it leads to being in harmony with your personal convictions. When is it wrong to think about our actions?

The vegans with whom I had conversations about veganism, New Zealanders of all people, enlightened, humorous and rich as Croesus, gave me two charming rules of thumb:

spoken with a New Zealand accent:
1. “Don’t eat anything with a face.”
As a non-vegan, I see veganism primarily as a practice of mercy.
2. “Read Peter Singer.”
But now out of theory and into practice:

My daughter, seven years old, likes to eat meat. We have a reliable source of Demeter beef and pork from Thuringia. This is our hipocrisy. Animals get slaughtered according to a lunar calendar.

I won't tell her not to eat anything that has a face.

But when the day comes when she says it to me, and the day will come, I will be defenseless before her mercy...and I will open an oyster for her.

No face, no problem. ;)

Footnotes

* Isn't PVPP one of the types of microplastics that are contaminating the world, the oceans, the fish, the sand on the beach, the air we breathe?
Yes. However, so little of it is needed to clarify wine that one has to ask whether 1000 tons a year is just “a drop in the ocean”.
Is it ok to clarify a wine with it to call it vegan?
To be fair, many wines are also clarified without being called vegan. One thing is clear: you can't use the fish bladder (it has a face) and call it vegan.
Hm, but if the fish bladder contains microplastics, is it generally not allowed to be used because it is contaminated? Or are we perhaps missing the perfect clarifying combination here?
A guitarist recently said “ you need to do what adults are capable of doing, which is to hold two contradictory ideas of one thing in your mind at one time. ” Did the Boss know he was quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald?
If you would like to know more about approaches to sustainable use of PVPP in winemaking, you can read more here:
Holistic and Sustainable Approach for Recycling and Valorization of Polyvinylpolypyrrolidone Used in Wine Fining
Sandrine S. Ferreira, Ana J. Alves, Luís Filipe-Ribeiro, Fernanda Cosme, and Fernando M. Nunes
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2018 6 (11), 14599-14606
DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.8b03208
Many thanks to barnivore.com and oekolandbau.de