VeganMoFo: Vegan booze in disguise - or the madness of supermarket labelling

This post is part of the Vegan Month of Food - or VeganMoFo to you and me. To learn more about VeganMoFo, click here.

I like wine.

There, I've said it.

I liked it when I wasn't vegan and I still like it now. Alas, finding vegan wine can be a tricky beast at the best of times.

Props then to Marks and Spencer who, I noticed recently, have started adding 'vegan' labels to their wines and other booze.

Hurrah! Anything supermarkets can do to make my alcohol consumption easier gets a big thumbs up from me.

However, on browsing the booze aisles, I found that the nation's favourite purveyor of functional ladies' underwear had no vegan sherry. Vegetarian, mind, just not vegan.

Sure, it may be the drink of OAPs but dammit, you don't get to be an OAP without gaining some wisdom - and it's evidently alcohol-related wisdom. Sherry is all kinds of awesome and if you don't agree, you're wrong.

But if you're a vegan, don't expect to be getting your sherry from M&S.

Or so I thought. Turns out, if you check out Marks and Spencer's list of vegan products, there are several vegan sherries listed, they just don't bear the 'vegan' mark on their labels.

So do I trust what's on the list, or what's on the label?

And it's not just a question of discrepancies between the list and on-product labels - it doesn't even look like the list is complete.

Take a look at these biscuits (ironically called Butter Puffs). There are no non-vegan ingredients in sight, yet the biscuits aren't labelled vegan on the packaging or on the product list.

Hopefully, this is just a question of time and Marks and Spencer are just running down their old, improperly-labelled stock before bringing in products with all the right stuff on.

In the meantime though, I'll keep steering clear of the sherry.

The wine? I'll be diving in.

2 comments

vegan.in.brighton5 October 2011 at 15:34
I'm pretty sure the M&S list is correct but their help department is super helpful if you want to double check stuff. Also I think it is just a matter of time before they sort the labelling out properly but sometimes they won't put the vegan V if stuff's made in the same room or even factory as non-vegan foods, hence the reason that the bourbon biscuits only have a vegetarian V in M&S, The Co-Op & Sainsburys.

Those butter puff's look crazy though, I've never even bothered to pick them up to check!!
Steven6 October 2011 at 12:33
The m&s list has been notoriously inaccurate over the years. All kinds of entries that aren't even vegetarian.

An ex of mine was once told by them that "all their vegetarian wines are vegan"