[Argorak]

You will probably have to write a VCL plugin if you want to parse the cookie, but that's not a huge hassle.

[acdha]

You can handle cookies in pure VCL – the code's not particularly elegant but it's manageable for light usage:

https://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/VCLExampleRemovingSo...

[Argorak]

I'm not sure whether I would call "munging the cookie header with regexps" "cookie handling" ;).

[acdha]

Agreed – it's possible and for simple tasks such as stripping an analytics cookie it's workable but for anything more serious you'd want something like https://github.com/lkarsten/libvmod-cookie