'Diamonds Are a Wine's Best Friend'

Here we have a bottle of Madeleine Angevine wine from Whidbey Island Winery.

As you can see--well, maybe, it's a crummy cell phone pic--it is a 2002, which is getting rather mature for this grape...

And here you see something that causes many Americans to discard a perfectly drinkable wine: Wine Diamonds.


Okay, forget the Wikipedia article on Tartaric Crystals, as it contains a lot of chemistry.

Try this one:

Tartaric Crystals in Wine: the "Wine Diamonds" of Quality
By Stephan Schindler Platinum Quality Author

Have you ever come across what appear to be white flakes floating in your bottle of wine? Did you assume that this snow-globe appearance somehow meant the wine was flawed or ruined?

What you had most likely seen are tartaric crystals, commonly referred to as “wine diamonds” or Weinstein (”wine stone”) in German speaking countries. So do these wine diamonds signal a bad bottle of wine?

Opinions about this issue are divided and the reason is simple: you have bought flawless wine, but you have not bought aesthetically flawless wine. Depending upon where you are from, this can matter to you more or less.

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 down before it is bottled so that the white flakes, called crystallized tartaric acid, “fall out” and can be separated from the wine. But what price beauty? Cold stabilization influences a wine’s balance and taste: as some winemakers put it, the wine is actually being ripped apart, and the rapid cooling changes the wine’s colloidal structure. One might 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 wine acid will accumulate in the grape, and it is this wine acid which is the building block of wine diamonds. Furthermore, the more time the wine is given to ferment, the less wine diamonds will fall out during fermentation, but the more they will instead build up later in the bottle.

In other words, wine diamonds are an indicator that the grapes ripened for a long time, and that the winemaker fermented the wine slowly and with great care. Both are important precursors to crafting high quality wines.

The wine was absolutely drinkable, I assure you.