Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Food & Drink

The Manual may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site.

The 7 best vegan wines to add your rack

Each of these delicious wines are completely vegan

Lindsay Parrill
By
Red wine being poured into glass
Vinotecarium / Pixabay

When most people think about the vegan diet, they’re usually well aware that vegans can’t eat animal products like meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and dairy products. You may even know that some vegans also avoid honey because the commercial honey production process can be harmful to the health of the bees. But did you know that many wines are also not vegan?

Although the basic ingredients in wine are vegan by nature — as grape juice and yeast are not animal products — the actual process is to produce and bottle wine often involves the use of animal ingredients called fining agents. Essentially, unless a batch of wine is allowed to sit for quite a long time, it will contain sediment from the grapes. Because it’s in the best interest of commercial wineries to bottle the wine as soon as it’s ready to free up the barrel, the wine often doesn’t have as long to settle.

Recommended Videos

Therefore, to hasten the process, winemakers often use fining agents, which are sticky substances that adhere to particulates in the wine, so they can then be filtered out. The final filtering process does remove nearly all of the fining agents, but the agents are not only animal products themselves (such as isinglass from fish bladders, gelatin from hooves, casein, and albumin from egg whites), but are also usually produced by industries that exploit animals.

Related

Fortunately, there are several great winemakers that use vegan fining agents or give the wine ample time to settle, negating the need for fining agents altogether. Keep reading for the best vegan wines and make your next pour a vegan wine you can feel good about enjoying.

Avaline vegan wines
Avaline

Best vegan white wine: Avaline wine

Though the name may not scream vegan as much as Proudly Vegan wines, Avaline is a 100% vegan wine brand. Its vegan wine varieties include pinot noir, red, white, and rose. All Avaline wines are not only vegan, but they are also made from organic grapes grown without synthetic pesticides. There are no added artificial ingredients, sugars, colors, or concentrates. Avaline is committed to full transparency in its labeling and ingredients. The white wine is particularly delicious. It’s refreshingly dry and crisp and has the perfect hint of citrus.

Our Daily Red wine
Our Daily Wines/Facebook

Best vegan red wine: Our Daily Wines

Our Daily Wines makes all of its wines organic, free of synthetic additives, and preservatives. They are also certified USDA Organic, vegan, and gluten-free. In addition to that goodness, they are also free of preservatives and have no added sulfites. Our Daily Wines is proud of its mission to craft its wines with the belief that what goes into each glass is as important as how it treats the earth.

If that weren’t impressive enough, Our Daily Red, its most popular red blend, is beautifully smooth and vibrant and comes at a very affordable price. Other bottles offered are its organic cabernet sauvignon, California chardonnay, and California albarino.

2019 biodynamic cabernets sauvignon
Frey Vineyards

Best environmentally friendly vegan wine: Frey Vineyards 2019 biodynamic cabernet sauvignon

If the environmental benefits of being vegan are what resonates most with your values and priorities, you should look into the vegan wines from Frey Vineyards. These award-winning vegan wines are also gluten-free, and organic, and they contain no added sulfites. Moreover, Frey Vineyards is the first biodynamic vineyard in the U.S., which denotes its cultivation process that supports the soil, groundwater, and wildlife in the vineyard.

Though it has many vegan wines, we love the 2019 biodynamic cabernet sauvignon, which features grapes from Mendocino, California. This vibrant red has 14% ABV and flavors of allspice and huckleberry. Like all Frey Vineyard wines, there are no sulfites added.

Protector Cellars red wine can
Protector Cellars

Best vegan canned wine: Protector Cellars canned wines

Canned wine has become increasingly popular, as it offers a convenient way to enjoy wine on the go. Whether you’re off to an elegant picnic or simply want to enjoy a summery rosé on the beach, you can enjoy the canned vegan wines from Protector Cellars. It offers several delicious vegan wines. For red wine lovers, the cabernet sauvignon 2020 is a cabernet sauvignon that is (77%) from a region within the Paso Robles AVA blended with a touch of syrah (15%) and grenache (8%).

This vegan wine is aged for 10 months in French oak barrels, imparting oaky notes and soft tannins. Protector Cellars also makes other canned vegan wines, including a light, effervescent rose, a piquette, and a zingy sauvignon blanc. The sauvignon blanc is one of the crispest vegan white wines. It features grapes from a vineyard in Santa Barbara County that is whole-cluster-pressed and has notes of citrus, apple, pear, and apricot.

Champagne Legret Mineral
Champagne Jean-Pierre LEGRET

Best vegan Champagne: Champagne Legret Mineral

Champagne Legret Mineral is vegan Champagne perfect for any celebration. It is made from only chardonnay grapes from vineyards in La Marne on the Côte des Blancs, the Coteaux du Sézannais, and du Petit Morin. This vegan Champagne has a refreshingly fruity, citrusy, slightly floral taste, with notes of minerality from the iodine. variety, which brings finesse and elegance. It is 12% ABV.

Bellissima Prosecco
Bellissima Prosecco

Best vegan prosecco: Bellissima Prosecco

For great vegan prosecco and rosé options, consider the vegan wines from Bellissima Prosecco. The Bellissima Prosecco brut is elegant, rich, and very dry. It has the aromas of green apples and freshly baked bread. The company also has a zero-sugar prosecco for fans of sparkling wine who want to steer clear of sugar. This dry vegan wine is bubbly, light, and acidic, with flavors of grapefruit. Bellissima Prosecco makes other vegan wines, such as a sparkling rosé, prosecco rose, and zero-sugar sparkling rosé.

Vegan Wines wine club
Vegan Wines Wine Club

Best vegan wine subscription: Vegan Wines Wine Club

For those who like the idea of a wine subscription, you can join Vegan Wines Wine Club. As the name implies, Vegan Wines curates a marketplace of some of the best vegan wines from vineyards in California, other regions of the U.S., Chile, France, Italy, and more. It even has some of its own labeled vegan wines. Every wine on the site is 100% vegan.

The Vegan Wine Club includes quarterly shipments (one for each season) of six bottles of different hand-selected, delicious vegan wines from prominent national and international wine regions. It is a great way to be introduced to some of the best vegan wines, many of which are organic. You can also customize your shipments based on your preferences and can select the varietals and vintages you want to try. Club members get other perks like discounts and exclusive access to limited vegan wines.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Lindsay Parrill
Lindsay Parrill
Contributor
Lindsay is a graduate of California Culinary Academy, Le Cordon Bleu, San Francisco, from where she holds a degree in…
How to brunch like the French with lobster croissant and champagne
Chef Geoffrey Lechantoux at Maison Close shares his insights on lobster and frog legs for brunch.
Closeup of croissant lobster

The dining room of Maison Close. Maison Close

Brunch, that relaxing weekend breakfast of cocktails, omelets, and conversation with friends, is always a great time. But how about brunch with a French twist? Instead of eggs benedict or a spicy shakshuka, why not foie gras or a lobster brunch? We could all use a bit of luxury sometimes.

Read more
The 11 best grill and smoker recipes to make now
Tasty recipes to cook on your gas, charcoal, or pellet grill
Ducks in the Pig Pen

It's that time of year again when we neglect our Dutch ovens, slow cookers, and air fryers for our outdoor char-grilling and smoking devices. It doesn't matter if you're cooking with gas, charcoal, or pellets. The main is you're outside enjoying the nice weather with a a cold beer.

While everyone loves a tasty burger or hot dog, they can get boring after a while. Sometimes, we want to flex our culinary muscles at our grills and for anyone else who may be just hanging around us for the cold beer.

Read more
Your guide to the pescatarian diet for healthier living
If you're considering a new way of eating, this may be the perfect diet for you
Pea puree with fish

Are you thinking of changing your diet? If a healthier you is on the to-do list this year, you might consider the pescatarian diet. At its core, the pescatarian diet eliminates all meat except for fish and seafood. Plenty of research tells us eating red meat increases your chances of heart disease and even death by 3% to 7%. The study even suggests that eating poultry twice a week increases these risks by 4%.

You may have heard of the Blue Zone Diet. If you're not familiar, Blue Zones are areas around the world where people live the longest, healthiest lives. The research was conducted by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic fellow and bestselling author. These zones are located in Japan, Italy, Costa Rica, Greece, and California. There are a number of practices you can put in place to follow the Blue Zone Diet if you wish. However, for our purposes, it's simply important to note that the people living the longest and healthiest lives were neither vegans nor meat-eaters. They're pescatarians.
What is the pescatarian diet?

Read more