So you just opened a bottle of wine and you find some sediment in the glass. What do you do? First, there is nothing wrong with the wine, and many believe that this is a sign of quality. There are a couple of things that happen to wine during the making and/or aging process that produce sediment, and it is not exclusive to red wines. So what is it?

Sediment in wine is the stuff that collects on the side or bottom of the bottle. The sediment is a combination of the smaller color, acid and tannin compounds that bond together and can no longer stay dissolved in the wine. What about younger bottles? Wines that have a darker or richer color to them have more of these compounds to throw off and are able to produce sediment much earlier than most. The same is going to be true of wines that are extremely tannic. During the aging process, red wines lose some of their red color which turns to a more rusty color, and those tannic wines become more approachable as these compounds fall out of the wine. But in some cases the sediment that you see in the wine is due to the wine not being fined or filtered before bottling. So you are looking at any number of things from dead yeast or small particles from the grape skins, seeds, or stems, all from the winemaking process.

Well, what about the glass-like shards you find in your wine? If the bottle is intact then what you see is tartaric crystals, or wine diamonds! They too are completely harmless and most likely are a by-product of no filtration, or storage issues. During bottling most wines go through cold stabilization, a process by which a wine is cooled down before it is bottled and the crystallized tartaric acid, wine diamonds, fall out and can be separated from the wine before bottling. Wine that has not gone through cold stabilization still has the ability to create tartaric crystals and if the wine is stored at a temperature below that in which it was bottled, the diamonds could start to form.

This is the best way I have found to describe the process of sediment forming in the wine: if you took a glass of water and poured salt into the glass and stirred, the salt would dissolve in the water. It did not just disappear;  it has changed the water but is still part of the water. Now, look at the process backwards. The wine in the bottle has many different compounds suspended in it, and over time some of those particles mingle together and are no longer soluble. So, they fall out of the wine and produce sediment.

So now that you know what you have in your glass, what now? You have three options. Decant the bottle, filter the wine, or just enjoy the wondrous thing that is wine. The sediment is harmless and will fall to the bottom of your glass if it’s poured, just do not swirl your glass as much before you sip.

In vino veritas. In wine there is truth.

Daniel Sumrall, Wine Consultant at ABC on N. John Young Parkway in Kissimmee