Sediment

Let's stay home at least for today and put a temporary stop on whirlwind travel. You know, it's tough going from country to country, traveling for sometimes 12 or more hours, drinking wine all day, and then getting up and doing it again. It's a good thing it's all vicarious.

While we're drinking though, let's consider one of the things about wine that a lot of people think is just yucky -- sediment. Sediment -- it's the often flaky somewhat crystalline mostly solid stuff that often sticks to the side of your glass, but sometimes floats in the wine and often gets in your mouth.

Oh no! What will happen if you consume some. Will you get sick? Could you die?

Well, here is the good news. While you might not like sediment, and frankly, while it's not wine, it doesn't particularly bother me since it does taste like wine, but with a different texture, sediment will not hurt you. That's right, it won't give you strange diseases, it won't make you bald, and it won't make you more or less tipsy than the wine from which it came.

So, where does it come from and why do I have it?

Those of us who go to the store, buy a bottle, bring it home, open it, and drink it don't deal with sediment. There's a reason.

Just like any other blended liquid, wine is a solution consisting of a number of components. There are the grape skins and perhaps stems that have de-solidified, the pulp, the yeast, the tannins and other things imparted from the barrel, and more. During fermentation, they all come together to form a single, largely uniform solution.

Did you take high school chemistry? You might recall that either during reaction or at some point thereafter, sometimes solids would precipitate out of the liquid solution. That's what the sediment is; it's the precipitate. And most wine is cooperative enough to delay formation of that precipitate for a while, sometimes a long while.

As you know, however, I like the idea of aging ageworthy wine. What then? I am somewhat good about this, but not as good as I might be. Top wine restaurants tend to be very good about it and the typical wine drinker is not good at it at all.

There is a way to minimize the sediment that appears in wine. Turn your bottles. In a perfect world, give them about an 1/8 of a turn daily. In a real world, give them an 1/8 to a 1/4 of a turn monthly. In a true real world, turn them some amount when you remember to do so. It won't hurt the wine, but it will slow down formation of the precipitate and coax some of it back into solution.

Or, you can just deal with the sediment.