Who doesn’t dream of a little vineyard, in Tuscany maybe or in the Provence? With a chateau and a lot of sun, and late summer and fall fully dedicated to wine making.
We would quit our jobs, maybe have our own little vegetable and herbs garden near the house, make wine and be utterly happy … ok, enough with the fantasies! With the Perlage Wines, you can have this feeling, drink Italian wine, live La Dolce Vita and be happy – except you don’t have to do the hard work on the vineyard.

Perlage Wines: Sustainable Wine Making

Perlage Wines is an Italian company founded in 1985. Since then, the family business sees it as their task to produce high quality organic wine. They respect the soil, the biodiversity and the health of the local community. To do so, their wine is grown with very limited use of chemicals of aggressive pesticides. The biodynamic wines don’t use chemical compost and try to use less copper.

Vegan Wines – Not That Obvious

The Perlage Winery is specialised in organic and vegan wines. Now you are asking yourself what the fuss about vegan wine is – aren’t all wines vegan?
Wine is essentially made of fermented grapes, so it should be all natural and totally vegan. Generally, wines undergo some kind of clarification before being sold, because young wines are rather dull and cloudy at the beginning due to remains like yeast cells, bacteria and pieces of grape skin. This doesn’t change the taste of the wine at all and wines self-stabilise after some time. However, to accelerate the process, some winemakers add specific aids called fining agents to the wine. These work like magnets: They attract the haze-inducing particles in the wine. The emerging molecules are larger and precipitate out of the wine rapidly. This way they help stabilising and fining the wine faster.

Traditionally, common fining agents are casein (a milk protein), albumin (egg whites), gelatin (animal protein) and isinglass (fish bladder protein). Traces of these aids can stay in the wine after the fining. That’s why vegan wine is not automatically a given, depending on the added fining agent. Perlage Wines has decided to use different fining agents or no additives at all. Fining agents for vegan wines are for example bentonite, which is clay-based, or activated charcoal.

Organic and Biodynamic Wines

Perlage Wines is quite the pioneer among the Italian wines: they are one of the first wineries who only produce organic wines.

© All photos via Perlage Wines