How to faux-pas proof your next dinner party.

You’ve catered for dietary requirements, ensured you’re cooking with oil, not butter, and used separate utensils for vegan and non-vegan dishes, but what about the wine? For something that’s meant to be fermented grapes (and mostly is), it’s easy to forget not all wine is vegan. Here, we give you the rundown of why, tell you how to find wine that is, and recommend some top bottles from wineries that are making their practices more ethical.

Liquid Education

A vegan lifestyle means abstaining from anything containing or made using animal products, so a vegan wine is made without animal products. Which can be, but historically isn’t the norm. Young unfiltered wine can be cloudy and contain floating particles (proteins, tartrates, tannins, phenolics) which can be detrimental to the flavour, texture or colour. Generally, this self-corrects over time, but often wine producers speed up the process by something known as “fining”, but essentially is filtering. Fining agents are traditionally animal-derived products: egg whites, bone marrow, gelatin, fish oil or shell fibres. That they discovered bone marrow could clean wine in the first place is quite remarkable, but that’s no comfort to a vegan. Just as you can enjoy a burger without beef, there are ways to fine wine without animal products. Bentonite clay, activated charcoal, limestone, and silica gel are all filters currently employed by vegan wine makers that do the same job. The other way to get around it is to not fine the wine, and let it stabilize on its own, with time. These non-filtered wines are also known as “natural” wines.

Spot the vegan

Nowadays, vegan wines are readily available. Some brands, like The Vegan Wine Project, make it really easy because it’s all in the name. We’re particularly partial to their plummy, soft Shiraz. For everything else, Australian labeling laws require wine produces to declare the use of processing aids, and what they were, on their label and the description always mention if the wine is “not-fined” or “not-filtered”. International labelling laws differ, so it’s not as easy to tell if a wine is vegan or not. If you’re in a Dan’s store or on our website, we’ll always tell you, and if you’re not sure, just ask our staff or chat bot.

Table talk

You’re serving vegan, so it’s good to know a little about the bottles you’re pouring and show your woke friends that you’ve done your research. First topic of conversation, 6Ft6 winery. This cool-climate vineyard in the Moorabool Valley, Geelong, pumps out seven varietals of vegan wine filtered with a pea and potato protein. As their chief winemaker Duncan Lowe says, “it works just as well as gelatin and egg whites.” If you’ve not tried their wines before, start with the pinot noir, it has a beautiful spicy cherry ﬂavour that has become their signature. Over in New Zealand, Zephyr, hailing from Marlborough on the northern tip of the South Island, is answering the call for more organic NZ produce (something the wine industry is leading the way in). Several of their bottles are certified organic, including the Sauvignon Blanc which has all the qualities of a great NZ Sauv Blanc and a vibrant energy that makes it very drinkable.

Top drops

First up, a Spanish Grenache made with organic cultivation. The makers of Mil Historias Grenache don’t use any synthetic fertilisers and restrict the yield to around 1.5 kilos per vine. The grapes are hand-harvested and vinified as naturally as possible with native yeasts. Then it’s oaked with clay amphora for several months to achieve purity and complexity. The result is a concentrated aroma and flavour, making for a unique drop. Next, from France, a single vineyard release from Dominique Piron, Brouilly. Thought of as the most approachable of these wines, it’s fleshier, richer, softer and more supple than the rest of the non-fined label. Closer to home, there are two very notable natural Shirazs.

Chapel Hill The Vicar McLaren Vale Shiraz is the flagship wine and a true testament to the South Australian winery. It’s inky purple in colour and has a nose of dark fruits, aniseed, violets and satsuma plums. A special wine designed to savour. For even more special occasions (with vegans or not), a bottle of Glaetzer AMON-Ra Shiraz can’t be beat. Named for an Egyptian god but produced in the Barossa Valley, it’s deliciously smooth with a subtle oak and a delightful ruby-red colour. It’s great for drinking now, and will be even more magnificent in a few years, so if you can resist, pop it on the shelf for three-five years.