Wednesday, April 18 2012
Diamonds Are a Wine's Best Friend?
Picture yourself in a boat on a riverWith tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
Have you ever come across what appear to be tiny flakes or crystals in your wine, or in your bag of juice, or at the bottom of a carboy after racking? Did you wonder if the appearance of this deposit meant that the wine was flawed, or that your equipment might be damaged by it, or (worst of all!) that the wine might not be safe to drink?
Gadzooks! Lookit that muck in my wine!There's very good news if you have: the deposit you've seen is wine diamonds, a well-known and well-understood natural phenomenon in winemaking, and one that's been around as long as people have made their own wine--in fact, they have found this residue on wine vessels over ten thousand years old!
Not only is the wine safe to drink, it's going to be delicious, and the crystals themselves are something that most winemakers will have paid for under a different guise (more on that below). But for people not used to seeing any deposit in their bottles, we need to have all the facts.
Posted by Diamond Tim Brady AT 3:25PM | 1 Comment | Post A Comment |
Comments
Dave B.
Posted 1 year ago
I get those in my Selection Estate Napa Valley Stag's Leap District Merlot (that's a long name!) after it sits over a winter in my crawl space. It would be considered a defect if I were to send it to WineMaker Mag's International Amateur Winemaker's competition, but I relish them, as only the best kits I have ever made have dropped diamonds. Nice Beatles (Sgt. Pepper) reference by the way.
While tartrate crystals aren't precisely a signifier of quality, they are a naturally occuring part of the process, and I've always felt that after they dropped out the flavours of the wine were a bit more focused and intense--could just be me.
I found out recently that the inspiration behind the Beatle's song was a real person--sadly, now passed. She looked lovely.
Lucy Vodden (nee O'Donnell), the original Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds