Vegan
It is clear that many winemakers are concerned only with creating great wine and don’t feel the need to piggy back on current fashions. The fashions are consumer, and to a certain degree merchant led. An in vogue trend with many wine merchants at the moment is to advertise how many vegan wines they have in stock, suggesting that vegan wine is somehow a new thing. For a wine not to be vegan, it just has to be fined using egg whites, milk or isinglass (the protein obtained from fish swim bladders). Wine protein is positively charged and is responsible for cloudiness in wine.Albumin, Casein (the proteins found in egg whites and milk) and Isinglass are negatively charged particles. Working on the principle of opposites attracting, the positive and negatively charged particles bond together and drop out, resulting in a clear wine. These fining agents have been common throughout winemaking but equally as common is Bentonite, a clay-based fining agent that does exactly the same job and has been used for years. Wine makers from the USA seem to have been aware of this for a longer time, perhaps due to the US being a more health conscious nation.
