Our next installment of Customer Take Over comes as a question from Adrienne, who isn’t an active customer as far as we can tell, but is clearly on the mailing list.
Adrienne simply asked, “Do you carry vegan wines? I am vegan.”
Well, no one in the industry is going to like this answer, especially the organic, unfiltered, biodynamic, sustainable, insert hot word, wine producers.
No wine is vegan.
While there is truth that non-animal derived products can be found for filtering and fining wines nowadays, unless you have an absolutely sterile wine lab with 100% absolute protection from the outside world, which no one does mind you, there is one yucky reality of fermenting fruits and sugars…
Bugs.
Insects are animals (they belong to largest phylum of the animal kingdom, arthropods). And if you’ve ever left wine or juice or fruit out in the open air long enough, you’ve encountered fruit flies, white spiders, a number of other flies, and ants, at a bare minimum. If you think these critters don’t find some way into the vats or fermentation vessels, you’re very wrong.
While wineries have called themselves “vegan friendly” or produced “vegan” wine, it is sadly a marketing farce.
More simply: if you have sugars, you have bugs, if you have bugs, you are not vegan.
Although there is the argument that bugs don’t have the same nervous system like mammals and thus don’t feel pain, but that is still debatable, and we’ve never heard of vegans incorporating insects in their diet.
Sad, painfully honest truth here.
No wine is truly vegan.