Have you ever come across what appears to be white flakes floating in your wine bottle? Did you assume that this snow globe appearance somehow meant that the wine was flawed or spoiled?
What you have probably seen are tartaric crystals, commonly known as “wine diamonds” or Weinstein (“wine stone”) in German-speaking countries. So do these wine diamonds indicate a bad bottle of wine?
Opinions on this issue are divided and the reason is simple: you have bought impeccable wine, but you have not bought aesthetically impeccable wine. Depending on your place of origin, this may matter more or less to you.
The American wine drinker is not used to finding wine diamonds in their bottles. Here, most wines undergo a cold stabilization process, which is when a wine is cooled before being bottled so that the white flakes, called crystallized tartaric acid, “fall off” and can separate from the wine. But what is the price of beauty? Cold stabilization influences a wine’s balance and flavor: as some winemakers say, wine actually tears, and rapid cooling changes the colloidal structure of the wine. One could call it a clear case of style over substance.
There is another interesting correlation between wine stones and the quality of a wine: the longer the grapes hang on the vine (familiarly called “hang time”), the more acid from the wine accumulates in the grape, and it is this acid from the vine. The one who got the diamond building block came. Also, the longer the wine is spent fermenting, the fewer wine diamonds will fall off during fermentation, but the more will accumulate later in the bottle.
In other words, the wine diamonds are an indicator that the grapes ripened for a long time and that the winemaker fermented the wine slowly and very carefully. Both are important precursors to making high-quality wines.
Hans Gsellmann, chief winemaker at the famous Gsellmann & Gsellmann winery in Austria, explains it this way: “Part of the acid in grapes is tartrates, also known as salt. As the wine matures, these tartaric acid crystals fall off. It is a natural process that the wine goes through its way to the top of its elaboration, when you see these flakes at the bottom of the bottle or in the cork, you can be almost sure that you are opening the wine at the right time, you should consider yourself lucky. “
Wine-goers in the Old World have been known to look to bottles with wine stones as a sign of quality – it shows that the wine has not been stripped of its structure through unnatural cooling and is a sign of a well-matured wine. . Perhaps it is due to the longer history of winemaking in these countries that people have become accustomed to wine stones and seem to accept them. At least they seem to know that, if anything, the wine diamonds will have added roundness to the wine by subtracting some acid.
A new technology is emerging from France that promises to circumvent the entire colloidal problem: electrodialysis. But until every prominent winery has purchased one of these elegant French machines (and that will no doubt be a few decades from now) this rule applies: cold stabilization is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. You may stick with an aesthetically impeccable wine, but you also stick with a lesser wine.
