08/25/06 Wine Diamonds

Welcome to Vine to Wine this is your host Linda Moran. And today's topic just seems to come up on a regular basis. Have you ever noticed tiny crystals or flakes in the bottom of a bottle of wine? Did you think that perhaps the bottle wasn't clean? Or worse yet, did you think that it was broken glass? Well, neither is true  those are likely just "wine diamonds". "Wine diamonds" what a sexy sounding description for something really quite boring. Those tiny sparkly crystals at the bottom of the bottle - inadvertently poured into your glass or sometimes appearing on the bottom of the cork, those are wine diamonds. The sediment in the bottle or the glass has a crystalline look that resembles a precious stone. We seem to notice them most often in white wine. They are nothing more than the natural evolution of tartaric acid in wines. The youthful roughness of a wine is often the result of the stronger nature of the wine's tartaric acid. With age, the tartaric acid transforms to those undissolved particles of potassium bitartrate and solidifies into tiny harmless, tasteless crystals. A wine with tartrate crystals should not be judged badly. Harmless crystals in clear wine are nothing to be of concern. However, if the wine is also cloudy, there may be something wrong with it. That happens so infrequently that most of us will never see it. So - don't be concerned about the crystals, simply enjoy your encounter with wine diamonds. And thank you for joining me on today's Vine to Wine.