Weird & Wild Wine Tank

I’m showing you all kinds of yummy stuff these days.  This picture is showing the doorway into one of our 1000 gallon wine tanks.  Clyde has filtered all the wine that was in the tank and now we are left with the remains from the cold-stabilization process: tartrate crystals.  OK, hopefully I get this one correct; these crystals are potassium bitartrate which forms when the wine chills down or sits for a long period of time.  The potassium in the fresh wine combines with the tartaric acid to make these crystals.

This year the crystals looked very odd!  They built up on the inside of the door like stalagmites, or mud dauber nests.  Clyde has never seen tartrates form like this before so he grabbed the camera to share.  We saved a few of these for show and tell at the winery, in case you’d like to see these in person.  In the meantime, here’s a closer look at these miniature tartrate towers:

On a closer look, they look like coral.  Or worms.  I know it’s not appetizing-looking (especially when I describe them so delightfully), but these crystals are actually harvested (at much larger wineries than ourselves) and ground up into a fine powder so you can use them in your meringue cookies.  That’s right, these crystals are actually cream of tartar.  Cool huh?

We do filter our wine so these don’t actually make it into the bottle.  But if you do ever get a wine and notice sediment or small white flakes in the bottle, those are the same thing as what you see above, and you don’t have to worry that they will hurt you.  The are gritty and annoying though, so just pour your wine through a coffee filter to keep the crystals out of your wineglass.

Cheers!