Which Wines Throw Sediment? A Collector's Guide by Region and Age

Most wine never throws a sediment worth worrying about. The bulk of what gets bottled is fined, filtered, stabilized and drunk within a year or two, long before anything has had a chance to fall out of solution. But the bottles collectors care about most, the structured reds, the vintage Ports, the unfiltered wines laid down for a decade or more, are exactly the ones that do. Knowing which is which tells you, before you even pull the bottle from the rack, whether it needs to stand up the night before and come out of its bottle with care.

The short version: sediment is a function of three things. How much solid and phenolic material the wine started with, how much of it the winemaker removed before bottling, and how long the wine has spent in bottle since. Everything below is those three variables playing out region by region.

Why some wines throw sediment and others don't

Red wines are fermented with their skins and seeds, which is where nearly all of the color and most of the tannin come from. Over years in bottle, those pigments and tannins bind together into ever-longer chains, and once a chain gets too big to stay dissolved, it drops out. That is the dark, silty deposit you find in an old red, and it's also part of why old reds fade from purple toward brick. White wines are usually pressed off their skins before fermentation, so they have far less of this material to begin with. (We go deeper into the chemistry, and into tartrates and lees, in What Is Wine Sediment?)

Then there's winemaking. Racking, fining and filtering all remove solids before bottling, and cold stabilization removes the tartaric acid salts that would otherwise crystallize in your fridge. Plenty of serious producers deliberately do less of all this, on the view that it strips flavor and texture, which is why "unfined and unfiltered" on a label is a fairly reliable predictor of a deposit later on.

Finally, time. Wine Spectator's Dr. Vinny puts the rule of thumb at roughly ten years from the vintage date for a red to start showing noticeable sediment. The Wine Society in the UK is a little more aggressive, suggesting that traditional styles like mature Bordeaux, Rhône and Chianti are all likely to throw some sediment after about five years. Both are sensible starting points; the honest answer is that it varies bottle by bottle.

Region by region

Bordeaux and Cabernet-based wines

Red Bordeaux is the classic sediment wine, and Wine Spectator singles it out alongside vintage Port as famous for forming significant deposits with age. The same goes for the wines modeled on it: serious Napa Cabernet, Washington and Coonawarra Cabernet, the ambitious Cabernet blends of the southern hemisphere. Expect a light deposit somewhere in the five-to-ten-year window and a proper one, often clinging along the side of the bottle where it lay in the cellar, by fifteen or twenty.

The Rhône and Syrah

Northern Rhône Syrah (Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, Cornas) and the better Southern Rhône reds are dense, deeply colored wines built for the long haul, and they behave much like Bordeaux. The same applies to top Australian Shiraz and other ageworthy Syrah. Mature examples need separating from their sediment, but they are also where a gentle hand pays off: The Wine Society tells the story of a mature 1989 Hermitage La Chapelle decanted several hours early and found oxidized, all three bottles.

Barolo, Barbaresco and Nebbiolo

Nebbiolo is relatively pale for such a tannic grape, but traditionally made Barolo and Barbaresco are long-lived, often minimally filtered, and reliably throw a deposit with age. A Barolo with fifteen or more years on it should be treated as a sediment wine by default, and a bottle from a traditionalist producer even sooner.

Burgundy and Pinot Noir

Pinot Noir is thinner-skinned and lighter in pigment than Cabernet or Syrah, so aged Burgundy tends to throw a lighter deposit. Lighter, though, often means finer: a soft, dusty silt that rises at the slightest provocation. This is the wine the decanting basket was made for, and the reason many Burgundy lovers would rather pour straight from a cradled bottle than risk an aggressive decant. Treat any red Burgundy past fifteen years or so as fragile on both counts, sediment and air.

Italy and Spain beyond Piedmont

Mature Chianti Classico and Brunello di Montalcino, Ribera del Duero, Priorat and traditional Douro reds all belong in the "likely to throw sediment with age" column, roughly on the Bordeaux timetable. Long-aged Rioja Gran Reservas spend years in barrel before release, which gives solids a chance to settle out before bottling, but older bottles can still carry a deposit.

Vintage Port

The heavyweight. Vintage Port is bottled young and unfiltered and does its aging in bottle, so it always throws sediment. Port's governing body, the IVDP, describes vintage Port throwing a light deposit after about ten years in bottle, with the deposit getting thicker as the wine matures. Taylor's describes that deposit as a "crust" that becomes more compact with time and partly adheres to the glass, sometimes joined by thin translucent flakes called "beeswing" that float up if the bottle is disturbed.

Not all Port is like this. Tawny Ports and most ruby styles age in wood and are filtered before bottling, so they rarely need decanting. Crusted Port and unfiltered late bottled vintage (LBV) are the in-between cases: both are bottled without filtration and should be decanted, even though they throw less than a true vintage Port. Check the LBV label; the IVDP notes that unfiltered versions may say so. We're covering Port in depth in How to Decant Vintage Port.

Madeira

Old vintage Madeira (frasqueira) can live for an almost absurdly long time, and bottles with decades behind them often carry a deposit. The Madeira Wine Company recommends decanting older vintages to remove it and opening them well in advance, as a general rule one day for every ten years the wine has spent in bottle. Madeira is unusual in that it's normally stored upright, which makes the settling part easier.

White wines

White wines rarely throw the dark tannin-pigment sediment of reds, but they can throw crystals. Those glassy flecks on the underside of a cork or at the bottom of a bottle are tartrates, harmless salts of the grape's own tartaric acid. They're most common in wines that weren't cold stabilized and in high-acid, cool-climate whites; German Riesling is the textbook case, and Wines of Germany notes that the crystals (Weinstein) are most likely to appear in older, top-quality wines such as Auslese, Beerenauslese and Trockenbeerenauslese. Aged white Burgundy, Loire Chenin Blanc and other ageworthy whites can also carry tartrates or a light deposit.

Unfiltered and natural wines, at any age

Age is a good predictor for conventionally made wines, but not for unfiltered ones. Wine Spectator notes that some young reds, especially those that haven't been fined or filtered, throw sediment too, and many natural and low-intervention wines arrive with a fine haze of lees and grape solids from day one. Some of these are meant to be a little cloudy. Many others, as our FAQ points out, pour perfectly clear if the bottle stands upright for a while first and comes out of the bottle gently.

Sparkling wine

Traditional-method sparkling wines age on their lees in bottle, but the lees are riddled into the neck and removed before the wine is sold, so a finished Champagne shouldn't carry sediment. Pét-nats and other ancestral-method wines are another story: many are bottled with their lees and are cloudy by design. Either way, the decanting methods in this journal assume still wine, and the Jory in particular doesn't work with sparkling wine.

Age by age: a rough timeline

All of this condenses into a working timeline for conventionally made, ageworthy wines. Treat it as a guide to when you should start checking, not as a guarantee.

• Under five years: sediment is unusual, apart from tartrate crystals and unfiltered or natural wines. Young vintage Port is the exception; it's usually too young to drink anyway.
• Five to ten years: traditional, structured reds (Bordeaux and its imitators, Rhône, Nebbiolo, Brunello) may begin throwing a light deposit. Unfiltered bottles are more likely than filtered ones.
• Ten to twenty years: expect sediment in most serious reds and in vintage Port. Burgundy's deposit is typically lighter but finer.
• Twenty years and beyond: assume every red and every vintage Port has a deposit, often a heavy one. Old whites may carry tartrates or a light silt.

Two complications. First, storage matters: a bottle stored on its side spreads its deposit along the flank, and a bottle that was shaken in transit will have it suspended throughout. Second, as Jancis Robinson points out, some wines coat the inside of the bottle with a deposit that never falls to the bottom no matter how long you stand it up. That film won't cloud the wine, but it can fool you into thinking a bottle hasn't settled.

So, does my wine need decanting?

It depends which kind of decanting you mean. "Decanting" covers two different jobs, separating wine from its sediment and giving it air, and a given bottle may need one, both or neither. We untangle the two in Decanting vs. Aerating Wine. For the sediment question specifically, the answer comes from looking rather than guessing.

Stand the bottle upright for at least a few minutes, then shine a phone flashlight or a candle through the bottom edge of the glass. A dark ring of silt, a crust along one side, or a scatter of crystals means there's something to leave behind. With a bottle that's been lying down, give it far longer than a few minutes before you judge, and ideally overnight before you open it; our guide to how long wine should stand upright covers the timetable.

If you find a deposit, you have a choice of methods. The traditional candlelit pour works with a steady hand and some sacrifice at the end of the bottle. A basket suits fragile Burgundy. Cheesecloth catches cork crumbs but lets fine sediment through. A siphon such as the Jory draws the wine out of an upright bottle without tilting it, so the deposit stays where it settled, the wine doesn't pass through the neck, and it isn't aerated on the way. Its constraints are that the bottle has to sit higher than the decanter and that it won't handle sparkling wine. Each method is walked through step by step in our guide to decanting wine with sediment.

If the bottle is old enough to throw a heavy deposit, it's also probably old enough to have a fragile cork, so read how to open an old bottle of wine before you reach for the corkscrew.

The collector's habit

The useful habit is simple. When you decide what you're opening, check the vintage and the style against the guide above. If it's an ageworthy red with a decade behind it, a vintage Port, an old Madeira or anything unfiltered, stand it up that day and check the base with a light before you open it. If it's a young, filtered wine with nothing in it, pour it and enjoy it. Most of the bottles that disappoint because of sediment aren't flawed. They just weren't given a day's notice.