Until I spent a few days with a vegan family, playing poker, drinking wine and eating what they ate, I had no idea how good a vegan diet can make you feel. I learnt a few other things too. “Yeah, we used to cook that a lot when we first became vegan,” said one of the boys after I made my only contribution to the menu, an anchovy-free version of spaghetti alla puttanesca with pine nuts, olives, finely grated lemon peel, fried breadcrumbs and parsley. Afterwards everyone was still hungry. And I understood – belatedly – that vegan food is best viewed not as a sub-species of vegetarian or carnivorous food (those, with a bit less) but as its own genus. To do it well you need to think along completely different lines.
Plant-based eating is growing in popularity. The Vegan Society estimates that the number of vegans in Great Britain quadrupled between 2014 and 2019 to around 600,000 and says that, since the start of the pandemic, one in four of us has reduced the amount of animal products in our diet. With millions participating in “Veganuary” this year I thought I’d take a look at what this means for the wine that goes on the table alongside plant-based food. Because if cooking (successful) vegan food requires you to adopt a new culinary lexicon, then picking the wine to go with it also demands more creativity.
“The same principles apply, but it allows for more discovery. I don’t think food and wine pairing has been so much fun as it is for me right now,” says David Havlik, sommelier at Gauthier Soho, the vegan fine dining restaurant.
Choosing wines to drink with food that is traditionally eaten in wine-making areas (and which usually contains animal products) always gives you an easy fallback option: you can just pick local and, because the food and wine cultures have grown together, that will usually work. Failing that, there’s a rich background and history to draw from and a whole slew of established pairings that you can lean on: beef with pinot noir; lamb with cabernet sauvignon; albariño with seafood, and so on. You can still roll with some of the classic matches, you just might need to tweak them a bit. For instance, I often pick a chardonnay for foods with a creamy sauce; vegan creaminess tends to be lighter and fresher so you might want to pick a lighter, fresher chardonnay – a bit less oak, a bit less ripeness.
With vegan food you often need to look more carefully, not so much at individual ingredients but at how they harmonise on the plate. “Is the food a little spicy? Does some other element stand out?” says Havlik. He says the wines he reaches for most often at Gauthier tend to be Alsatian whites (for the aromatics), German whites (because a little bit of residual sugar, of sweetness, in the wine is a good balance for spice in food), orange wines (“they’re a personal passion but also very food-friendly”) and red wines “with a little less alcohol and a little less new oak, so that’s on-trend as well”.
Heavy reds are not as easy to pair with vegan food as they are with meat, though roasted root vegetables, mushrooms, black beans and aubergines can all be rich enough to counterbalance the weight of a big red if that’s what you feel like drinking. I also like cabernet sauvignon with (vegan) beetroot risotto or with a black bean and beetroot burger, and in her Home Cookery Year, Claire Thomson has a lovely recipe for mushroom meatballs with pearl barley that you can adapt to be vegan and which is great with Douro or Dão reds, or earthy southern French red blends.
Committed vegans will also want to make sure they are drinking vegan wine. And if you’re wondering how a wine could not be vegan then there are a couple of answers. First, many wines are “fined” before bottling, a process that involves passing a substance through the liquid to remove suspended solids and impurities. Non-vegan fining agents include isinglass (a gelatin from the air bladders of fish), milk protein and albumen (egg whites)two common vegan ones are bentonite and kaolin (both clays). Strict vegans might want to consider that many vineyards are farmed using horses to plough the vineyards, or sheep to graze in between the vines. Growers may also use animal manure or (in the case of biodynamically run vineyards) preparations that involve animal parts (such as a cow horn or stag’s bladder).
There has been a concerted move across the industry to make it easier to find vegan wine, though I say that with the caveat that when labelling a wine as “vegan” it’s often only the fining agent that is considered and that if you want to know about farming practices you will need to investigate further. The Waitrose Wine website has a “vegan” tab and lists 524 of its wines as being vegan, while M&S has committed to make its entire range vegan by the end of the year. Because different fining agents have different impacts on different wines, this hasn’t always been a straightforward process.
“Port and sherry have been quite a challenge,” says M&S’s in-house winemaker Sue Daniels. “They’re very moreish, very mouth-filling, and to get the clarity you need you really needed the animal proteins. So our producers did a huge amount of work trying different fining agents. Taylor’s did something like 85 fining trials to get the ports right. And in some cases you need to go back and make wines in a slightly different way so that they don’t need, or need less, fining.”
All wine coming in to M&S is now vegan, but Daniels adds: “We still have stock in shops and depots, in some cases almost a year of stock, that isn’t, so we can’t say we’re entirely vegan until that sells through; but we are now on track.”
