vegetarian wines

[Kcwhippet]

First off, I don't believe you'll find any commercial wines anymore that have been fined with chitin or ox blood. So you've reduced the equation to egg whites and casein. Egg whites have been used for hundreds of years to fine the red wines from Bordeaux and Burgundy in France, and I don't recall hearing of any vegetarians who've complained or refused to drink those wines. Casein's general use is to remove phenolics from white and blush wines. When these materials are used, their purpose is to attract and bind with undesireable materials in the wine, after which the entire glob settles to the bottom of the barrel. The wine is then racked out of the barrel and the fining agents and the materials they've bound are left behind. Another fining agent used is bentonite, which is a clay like material, and it's used by almost all commercial wineries now for white and blush wine fining, so there goes the casein. Egg whites are then about the only thing you have to worry about, and they're used in virtually all high quality red wines. As I said before, though, all that material drops to the bottom of the barrels and is left behind. Of course, you could look in your local shop for wines that say "Unfiltered, Unfined" on the label. There are quite a few of them.