Whether you're making the commitment to go entirely vegan or if you're just trying to make more mindful choices to include vegan (and vegetarian) products into your diet, you've probably realized pretty quickly that it's not as straightforward as it might seem. While there are a lot of snack foods that surprisingly are vegan — like Oreos, Twizzlers, and some popcorn — there are plenty of others that aren't as free from animal products as you might expect. For example, you'll need to be careful when eating jelly beans as a vegan , and the thing about drinks is that they're even trickier.
Let's take wine. Unless a wine label indicates that it's vegan-friendly, or that it's been certified under the guidelines of a legal firm like BevVeg!, there's a good chance that some surprising animal byproducts were used in the making of your wine. Those products aren't ingredients in quite the same way as grapes; instead, they're used as what's called fining agents.
Fining is a process where additives are used to help speed up the clarification process, which gets rid of cloudiness and sediment. When left to do that naturally, it can take a while. Add certain animal byproducts, and it can be done much quicker.
Are you drinking these products along with the wine? They're technically removed from the final product — which is one reason why they're not required to be labeled as an ingredient — but for anyone who is 100% vegan, there is still a concern that these products are not, in fa.
