Wine Sediment: What It Is, Is It Safe, and How to Remove It

If you've just found dark flecks, fine silt, or what appear to be tiny shards of glass at the bottom of your wine, the news is good: sediment is natural, harmless, and in older wines, expected. It's made of grape solids, spent yeast, tannins, and tartrate crystals that slowly fall out of the wine over time. Nothing about it will hurt you.

What it will do, if you let it, is potentially detract from the way the wine tastes. That's the part most people don't know, and the reason it's worth a few minutes to understand what you're looking at.

What is wine sediment, exactly?

Sediment is a catch-all term, and depending on the bottle you might be dealing with a few different things.

The little crystals that look like glass or coarse sugar, often stuck to the bottom of the cork, are tartrates. Some people call them wine diamonds. They're crystallized tartaric acid, a natural component of grapes, and they form when a wine spends time at cold temperatures. You'll find them in whites as often as reds. They have no flavor, pose no risk, and if anything suggest the wine wasn't aggressively processed before bottling.

The silty, dusty deposit in an older red is a different animal. As a red wine ages, its color pigments and tannins gradually bind together into particles heavy enough to drop out of suspension. A 20-year-old Bordeaux or Barolo without any sediment would honestly be a little suspicious. This fine sediment is the natural residue of maturation, and it's also the kind that causes the most trouble in the glass, because it's light enough to stir up and slow to resettle.

Then there are winemaking solids. Plenty of good producers bottle without fining or filtering these days, on the theory that filtration strips texture and flavor along with the particles. Those wines can carry fine lees and grape matter into the bottle from day one.

Is it safe to drink?

Yes. Everything in wine sediment came from the grapes or the fermentation. There's nothing spoiled or dangerous about it, and finding it doesn't mean the wine has gone bad. Quite often it means the opposite.

Safe and pleasant are different questions, though.

What sediment does to the wine

Sediment sitting quietly at the bottom of a bottle does nothing. Sediment stirred up and suspended in the wine is another matter. It coats the tongue and turns the texture gritty and drying. It muffles aromas and flavors that the wine spent decades developing, so an old bottle that should be singing comes across flat and simple. The finish, which in a mature wine ought to go on and on, gets cut short. And the wine looks wrong in the glass: muddy and opaque where it should be brilliantly clear with that lovely brick-colored rim.

If you're skeptical, run the experiment. Decant a sedimented bottle carefully, pour yourself a clean glass, then swirl the dregs out of the bottle into a second glass and taste them side by side. We've done this many times. The difference is not subtle.

Which wines have sediment?

Most reds start throwing a deposit somewhere between five and ten years in bottle, and nearly all old reds have one. Vintage Port is famous for it, to the point that decanting Port is considered non-negotiable. Unfined and unfiltered wines of any age and color can carry solids, and cool-climate whites often have a few tartrates.

Checking a bottle takes about ten seconds. Stand it upright for a few minutes, then hold a phone flashlight or a candle under the base and look down through the shoulder. Any deposit shows up as a dark layer along the bottom edge.

How to get the sediment out

Whatever else you do, start by standing the bottle upright and leaving it alone. If it's been lying on its side, the sediment is smeared along the bottle's flank, and no decanting method on earth can separate sediment that hasn't settled. Ten or fifteen minutes helps. A few hours is much better. Overnight is ideal, and if you know on Tuesday that you're opening the bottle Saturday, stand it up Tuesday.

From there you have options.

The traditional approach is to open the bottle gently and pour it slowly into a decanter while watching the shoulder over a candle or flashlight. When the dark wisp of sediment starts creeping toward the neck, you stop. This has worked tolerably well for a couple of centuries, and with practice it handles coarse sediment fine. Its weaknesses are built in, though: the act of pouring can kick the deposit back into suspension, especially near the end, so you're forced to choose between sacrificing the last few ounces and clouding the decanter. The wine also has to travel through the neck of the bottle, which after years of horizontal storage may be coated in sediment, mold, or bits of old cork. And pouring aerates the wine, which a sturdy young red won't mind but a delicate old one might.

Some collectors use a wine basket instead, resting the opened bottle at a shallow angle so the sediment settles along the bottom edge, then pouring carefully from the basket. It's a charming, old-school method and we have real affection for it, but it shares the same fundamental problems: the deposit can still kick up as the bottle empties, and the wine still goes through the neck.

Cheesecloth catches cork fragments and coarse bits, which makes it a fine rescue tool when a cork crumbles into the bottle. As a sediment solution it disappoints, because the fine sediment that actually affects flavor and texture passes straight through, and the cloth can leave its own flavors behind.

The fourth option is to siphon the wine instead of pouring it. The bottle never moves; a tube draws the wine up from inside, starting just above the settled deposit, so there's simply no action that can stir anything up. The wine never touches the neck, and because it isn't splashing through air, the method adds essentially no oxygen, which matters a great deal with fragile old bottles. This is the problem we built the Jory to solve. It's a hands-free siphon made for wine, with an adjustable stainless steel straw and a silicone stopper to set the depth, built entirely from the same inert materials used in wine cellars. Once the siphon starts, it empties the bottle on its own in about three minutes and leaves every speck of sediment behind.

A few last things worth knowing

Don't give the bottle a swirl to "check on it" before serving. One careless second undoes hours of settling. If the bottle is past twenty years old, reach for an ah-so or The Durand rather than a standard corkscrew, because old corks crumble and a crumbled cork is a worse problem than sediment. A young wine with a few tartrates needs no intervention at all; just leave the last sip in the bottle. And remember that cloudy isn't always sediment. Some natural and unfiltered wines are hazy by design, and no amount of settling will change that, because that's the wine.

Sediment is what a wine leaves behind on its way to becoming interesting. Handle the bottle with a little care, and everything above that deposit is the reason you cellared it in the first place.