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If you’re squeamish, stop reading right now. I mean it. Turn the page, look at the pretty models, go read about absinthe, or scarves, or dildos, or whatever the other columnists are writing about this issue. Because you’re going to be seriously squicked by what follows.

In my wine classes and over email, I’m occasionally asked if there are vegetarian or vegan wines. The safe answer is “no.” But in reality, it’s more complicated than that…

For most of its pre-bottling life, wine isn’t the transparent beverage we’re used to. It’s clouded with all manner of particles, and most wineries (though not all) remove them before they put their wine on the market. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, and one of the easiest is called fining, whereby a substance is added that gathers floating particles, after which it and the attached particles are removed.

Anyone who’s clarified a soup or a stock at home will be familiar with this technique and the egg whites that are usually employed. It’s the same with wine. Another fining agent, though one that’s somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years, is isinglass, a collagen derived from fish bladders.

There are fining agents that don’t involve the use of animal products – bentonite is one of the most popular – and while none of these things remains in the wine, obviously vegans will need to know which has been used before they can consume wine without worry.

But there’s a bigger issue, one that affects vegetarians as well, and that’s the harvest. The vast majority of wines are made from grapes harvested by machine. Now, if you’ve ever seen a harvester in action, you know how efficient they are at scything through whatever’s in front of them. Sticks, stones, insects, rodents both small and large, amphibians, even the occasional larger mammal…all can and do end up in the harvester’s bin. And not, as a rule, intact. Winegrowers euphemistically call this MOG, which stands for “matter other than grapes.”

Now, only at the most industrial and uncaring of wineries are these things going to make it into or past the press, which squeezes juice from the grapes; there are filters of various sizes designed to keep gravel, splinters of vine, and pieces of shrew out of the sugary liquid that will soon become wine. But the simple fact is that machine-harvesting involves a certain amount of unavoidable carnage.

So vegans and vegetarians for moral reasons just need to stick to bentonite-fined, hand-harvested wines, right?

Well, even with hand-harvesting, some insects can slip through the process; pickers don’t have time to carefully inspect each grape as they cut it from the vine. Shy bugs can and do take a free ride all the way to the cellar machinery that will end their life. But they’re far outnumbered by the most common denizen of wineries at harvest time: the fruit fly. There are zillions of these things teeming in and around any bin of freshly-harvested grapes, they will end up in the crusher (which hacks open grapes to release their juice) and the press, and their constituent parts will not all be stopped by the filters I’ve mentioned. Thus, carnivores and vegans alike will have a bit of fermented fruit fly in their wine.

(It can get worse. A few years back, one of Canada’s wine regions was hit by a massive infestation of ladybugs at harvest. Almost as numerous as fruit flies, they got into everything, and some experts can still identify a “ladybug vintage” wine just by the taste. Really.)

So what’s a careful drinker to do? First, it’s obvious that vegans and certain vegetarians need to know more about how a given wine is made that the average consumer. And second, a perhaps difficult decision must be made. Fruit flies and other insects are and unavoidable part of the processing of nearly all agricultural products, and wine is neither better nor worse in this regard. Concerned drinkers need to judge for themselves what they are and aren’t willing to accept in the production of their food.

Now…don’t you wish you’d taken my advice and read something else?

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)