Foursight: The First Anderson Valley Winery to List Ingredients!

Today we a big landmark for our winery: after going back and forth with the TTB for months, we've finally gotten our approval to bottle our 2010 Semillon this August with an ingredients statement and verbiage that states the wine is suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

The TTB has been resistant to allowing our ingredients statement, vowing that we must have missed at least the yeast (nope - we use wild!), and if not yeast then acid, enzymes or something else. This, of course, is ludicrous.You certainly can make wine this way, even if they haven't seen many ingredients statements from wineries and most others that do include ingredients list yeast, tartaric acid and other products.

So, Foursight just became the first winery in Anderson Valley to voluntarily list ingredients on one of our wine labels!

I was also pleased that the TTB allowed us to state that our wines are suitable for vegetarian and vegan diets. Clos La Chance has begun marketing all vegan wines, but the TTB didn't allow them to say that the wines didn't use animal products (see the Wines & Vines article here). Frey is a noted vegan producer but their wines don't list it on the label. So, unless anyone out there has a correction for me, I have yet to find another U.S. producer with a vegan and vegetarian statement on their wine labels.





Yes, we did have to remove our reference to wild ML (they don't recognize it), but that's another battle for another day. All I can say is - WOOHOO!

Comments

Mike Duffy said…
I'm going to be really stupid and ask "Aren't all wines suitable for vegetarians and vegans?" If not, what gets added to the wine that isn't suitable for them? Thanks!
Hi Mike - I love questions, so thanks for asking it. Actually, there are many substances that can be used in the winemaking process that are not vegetarian or vegan friendly. They're derived from animal products. So, no, not all wines are good for veggies/vegans. The main substances are fining agents, which clarify the wines: things like isinglass, casein, etc. They're derived from fish and other animals.

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