As the world starts to care more about animal rights and people are becoming increasingly more health-conscious, vegan wine is making a big mark on the wine market these days. As such, there are plenty of clubs out there for vegans to choose from.
| Written by Lucie Robson Updated on November 18, 2021 |
Naturally, the best club for vegan wine is one that focuses on this exclusively. Vegan Wines is the top vegan wine club for more than just its wide selection of animal-friendly varietals. The ethics of the company is unrivaled and is one that vegans can support. Read the full Vegan Wines review here >> |
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Be sure that the club actually offers vegan wines. That’s why it’s best to pick a club that deals exclusively in vegan wines, and only supports the wineries that don’t use any animal products at all. Also, choose a company that cares about animals.
There are plenty of wine clubs to go around, but finding one with even a limited selection of vegan alternatives isn’t the easiest to come across. We’ve checked all the clubs out there, and of all the ones that do provide vegan wine, put together our top 10 list, starting with Vegan Wines. There’s probably no surprises there.
Possibly the cream of the crop of clubs with products 100% free from animal products is Vegan Wines. From the vineyard to the winery, there is not a trace of any animal agents in soil fertilizers or the fining process.
You receive hand-picked, top-quality reds and whites from smaller producers that are passionate about creating vegan wines and show conscientiousness every step of the way. There are three clubs for you to pick and choose from. The Signature Club features the classics made in a wide range of styles while the Light Lovers Club puts low-alcohol and -sugar products in the spotlight. Those who love their Cab Sauv and Merlot can indulge with membership of the Red Lovers Club which features bottles from across the globe. Tasting and food pairing notes come with each.
One of the great things about Vegan Wines is you can try it out with a Club Sampler Trio before you commit.
Read more about this ethical alternative to wine clubs in our review.
The objective of Winc from its launch in 2012 has been to share the best that Californian artisanal wineries have to offer with those who share their passion for the juice of the grape. Its selection focuses on reds and whites from small producers plus a few from the classic Old-World regions we all know and love.
Vegans have something to celebrate when they join Winc. It has a great choice of reds and whites covering grapes like Chardonnay, Grenache, and Pinot Noir that are produced without any use of animal products. What this means is in the fining process sediment is removed from the red or white with vegetal or mineral agents. Winc regularly adds new products to its portfolio so there’s always a new, fresh bottle to try.
Shipments are suited to your individual tastes thanks to a Palate Profile Quiz and you get a $20 discount off your first case.
Get the full picture of Winc and what our experiences were by reading our review.
Ever wished you could taste a range of mini glasses before committing and tired of shipments full of reds and whites that don’t reflect your tastes? If so, Vinebox is your club. You get to try glass-sized samples and opt for a bottle when one ticks all your boxes.
Every quarter, Vinebox sends you nine 100-ml servings of a range of classics mostly from European vineyards giving you the chance to taste before you purchase any more. When you do find a wine (or wines!) you love, Vinebox will arrange sourcing and delivery with the costs covered by credits you build up with each of your sample deliveries.
This club uses cutting-edge fractioning tech to keep samples bright and rich so you don’t need to worry about tired flavors. The tasting team has tried nearly 11,500 wines and only 1% has made it through so you get the cream of the crop.
Have a read of our review and learn everything about Vinebox that you need to know.
Naked Wines’ approach that sees it
It’s no surprise that a club focusing on connecting artisanal producers with oenophiles hungry for nothing less than the authentic has links to the finest vegan wines going. Naked Wines connects ambitious vintners and its 300,000 members in a model that sees subscription fees used to fund unique projects and members getting first dibs on the results. Prices are kept to a jaw-dropping low because there are no middlemen.
Sounds like a win-win? It gets even better if you follow a vegan diet. Naked Wines’ portfolio features an impressive range of red and whites free from the use of animal products in the vineyard or the winery. Chardonnay, Shiraz, and Viognier are just a few of the grape varieties plus a selection of blends will really get your taste buds dancing.
If you want to nerd down with your favorite winemaker about that splendid vegan Sauv Blanc, you can hop onto fun communal chat areas.
Read our full review here.
You know you’ve struck wine gold when you find a club that’s dedicated to sourcing the healthiest there is without compromising your taste buds. Dry Farm Wines specializes in bottles with low alcohol, sugar, and sulfite levels that taste spectacular. If living purely is important to you, this is your club.
The alcohol levels in Dry Farm Wines range start at 7% ABV and don’t exceed 12.5% while sugar is jaw-droppingly low at 0-0.15g per glass. Sulfites are also way down there. Its selection also features products that are dry-farmed (hence the name) meaning vines are not irrigated and have to find their own water source deep in the soil. This results in better quality grapes plus saves an estimated 1.4 billion gallons of water annually among Dry Farm Wines producers.
Healthy, good for the planet, and great tasting, what’s not to like about Dry Farm Wines?
Learn more in our review.
Wine Insiders is like the gateway to keeping your shelf filled with top-quality artisanal wine from every major region at good-value prices. Every bottle is exclusive to this club so you can sit back and expect shipments full of variety that you simply can’t find anywhere else. Its selection has garnered 1,250 awards from top competitions and critics, but costs are low because it avoids markups so you get the savings.
Wine Insiders kicks it all off with an excellent introductory delivery of 12 top-notch wines along with three bonus Bordeaux blends for less than $90. Each bottle comes with background information on the vineyard and producers plus tasting notes and food pairing ideas.
Wine Insiders likes to throw in free gifts that make service and storage more professional. In your second shipment, you get a complimentary 7-Piece Connoisseur's Deluxe Lever Pull Corkscrew Set with a pourer, stopper, and more super-handy gizmos.
Learn more about Wine Insiders in our review.
The WSJ Wine sommelier team sips its way around the globe picking up fine vintages along the way that touch on popular styles, grapes, and regions. Since 2008, this club has been filling the shelves of oenophiles with the most interesting, exclusive, and best thanks to an enviable network of connections across family producers and famed houses.
An introductory offer gives your taste buds an insight into the quality you can expect from membership. You receive 12 premium bottles and a bonus gift for $69.99. If you like what you taste (and you will!), you can sign up for a choice of two clubs: The Discovery Club which brings you a dozen bottles that have been consistently highly rated by fellow members or the Premier Club which features limited-editions and award winners.
An accompanying pamphlet provides a deep dive into the background of each bottle with educational tasting notes and yummy ideas for pairing.
Read our review to get all the answers on WSJ.
Combine your passion for public radio with your love of Chardonnay, Shiraz, and Malbec with membership of the NPR Wine Club. Each time you order a 6 or 12-bottle shipment, a cut of your subscription goes toward supporting public radio programming. How this club does this while keeping your subs super-low is anyone’s guess, but it does and it’s a wonderful win-win for all.
You can expect a case full of the best from classic Old and New World regions like France, Italy, Argentina, and other much-loved areas. For fun, some bottles feature labels sporting the names of popular NPR programs so you can sip them while you tune in (but it’s not obligatory!).
Your first shipment is discounted and although the following cases are priced normally, the value for money is still incredible. To deepen your enjoyment, the NPR Wine Club throws in tasting notes and ideas on food matching.
Get our thoughts on NPR in our review.
Laithwaites has
Launched in 1969, Lathwaites has been in the business for so long, it knows its 700,000 members’ tastes inside out. It started in the UK and spread to the US and Australia building up an expert team of sommeliers that discovers the finest reds, whites, and rosés from all the regions everyone so loves.
Wherever it sources its wines, Laithwaites has an eagle eye on the shifting and changing preferences of subscribers – like the move toward natural and vegan wines. Thousands are tasted each year with a minuscule number making the grade and ending up in your case. You can expect the classics but also look forward to lesser-known beautifully tasting grapes for something new as well.
To enhance the experience of your wines, Laithwaites club includes super-interesting nuggets of information about the origin of each bottle in your shipment along with food pairing ideas and insightful tasting notes.
See if Laithwaites is for you in our review.
If you want to combine a healthy lifestyle with your Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Grenache, and Merlot, there’s no better club for you than Plonk. Its team tastes wines around the world in its quest for top organic and biodynamic products from artisanal producers. Whatever red or white you have in your glass, you can feel confident it contains no pesticides from the vineyard, or acidifiers, artificial sugars, or alcohol enhancements from the winery.
Founder Etty Klein has been featured in Wine Enthusiast's Top 40 Under 40 Tastemakers List in recognition of her visionary club, so you know you’re in good hands when you receive a case from Plonk. While known for organic and biodynamic wines, this club also highlights lesser-known varietals for spice and variety.
With each 4, 6, or 12-bottle shipment, you get the lowdown on the winery as well as deep-dive tasting notes and tasty ideas for food pairing.
Learn all about Plonk in our review.
Defining a vegan or vegetarian wine is surprisingly simple. It's a wine made without the use of any animal-derived products during the brewing process.
It all starts in the tanks or barrels, during a process known as 'fining’. During fining, wine is corrected or stabilized, to remove cloudiness and sediment particles, get rid of yeast, and to enhance color and soften tannins. These elements are later filtered out to deliver a clear wine with smoother tannins.
Animal-derived products are often put to work at this stage, to act as processing aids to speed up the fining time. These procession aids are used to help bind the unwanted elements which are later filtered out. Think of it as a magnet attracting all of the undesirable components around it. Then, when it’s thickened around the fining agent, the now larger mass of particles can be removed easily.
Products like egg white (albumin) are often used in red wine production, and gelatin and milk protein (casein) are used in white wine production. Egg white and milk protein may be suitable for vegetarians, but gelatin, which contains animal cartilage, is not an ingredient any vegetarian would want to consume.
Animal products aren’t added to wine as an ingredient per se, and you won't see it listed on the label. Once fining is complete, these 'fining' and processing aids are removed. It's very likely, however, that the wine may now contain tiny particles of these animal-derived products and can not be classified as vegan, or in some cases, vegetarian.
In addition to adding egg white, milk protein, and gelatin, which are most commonly used as binding agents, some other elements could also be added. These are the shells of crustaceans (chitosan) or fish membranes and bladders (isinglass), a form of collagen, or fish oils which are used to give wine clarity.
To completely clarify the use of animal products in the production of wine, you should pay attention to the full process. Start at the soil, consider the absolute beginning of the wine journey, and don't only scrutinize the contents of the bottle. The farming and bottling process should also be reviewed to define a bottle of wine as genuinely vegan.
Fertilizers are often made using animal-derived ingredients like bone meal or fish waste. Animal manure mixed with straw is sometimes used as compost in an attempt to use farming by-products. Authentic vegan wine should use organic methods and only plant-based and natural fertilizers.
When it comes to bottling, beeswax and milk-based glue may be used to seal bottles or applied during the corking process. Using these products would make a wine vegetarian, but not vegan.
Vegan and vegetarian wine processes and techniques involve using plant-based or mineral alternatives instead of animal-derived 'additions'. Additions are used carefully as the products are not added to the wine; they’re just used in the winemaking process. An important note to add is that organic wines aren’t necessarily vegan. The ultimate find would be an organic vegan wine!
A real vegan winemaking process would make use of all-natural or mineral-based ingredients. Expect to find elements like bentonite clay, plant or vegetable-based products like plant casein, or activated charcoal used in the process.
Using time and letting nature take its course is also a good solution. Wine does indeed have the ability to self clarify. In this process, the wine is left over a much more extended period to naturally mature, and no fining takes place. Over time the residual elements drop and sink to the bottom naturally as sediments.
The process is considerably slower and not ideal in a commercial wine production environment. In this instance, wines will be labeled as unfiltered, or un-fined. It's entirely natural and not at all harmful, just a much slower process. Vintage wines are some examples that were allowed to self-stabilize or self-fine without the addition of fining agents.
Searching for the best vegan wine? Look no further. More and more wineries and winemakers are becoming aware of the increased demand for vegan alternatives. Whether you are looking for red vegan wine, vegan white wine, or some renowned vegan red wine brands, you’ll be able to find an option. There are even options for cheap vegan wine and vegan boxed wine.
Here are the top picks from vegan labels across the globe.
Medium-bodied and unoaked, this is 100% Chardonnay. The Petit Chablis label dates back to 1944 and is used for dry whites made from Chardonnay.
This option is medium-bodied with a creamy almond finish. 100% Cortese. Made from vines averaging 35 years old, under the Gavi di Gavi label.
Medium-bodied consisting of 85% Chardonnay and 15% Sauvignon Blanc. This white wine is bone dry and exceptionally well priced as an entry point to this varietal.
An elegant dry red wine from the Bierzo region. It’s made from Mencía grapes varietals, offering a rustic and earthy palate.
A vibrant and full-bodied red blend. 77% Cabernet and 23% Malbec from the Wellington region located in the Western Cape wine lands of South Africa.
A rich Cabernet from Mendoza in the Tupungato sub-region. Made with organic grapes, it offers black fruit notes like blackberry, black currant, cherry, and raisins.
