Gran Selezione

Highest quality category in Chianti Classico. Wine must be made from estate grown grapes and aged at least 30 months before it is sold.

Sediment can appear in bottles of both red and white wines, although they tend to look slightly different. For older red wines, sediment is darker in color, while in older white wines sediment tends to be white.

Answer: False.

Sediment can only appear in older red wines. As red wine ages, color pigments in the wine combine with tannin to form long chains of molecules too heavy to stay in solution. Those molecules fall out of solution forming a sediment. The whitish, snowflake-like crystals that can sometimes precipitate out of white wines are called potassium bitartrate crystals, or just tartrates. These are flavorless crystals of acid that usually appear because of a quick and extreme drop in temperature of the wine.

Garrigue

When a wine pro describes a wine as “earthy,” the characterization can mean several different but related ideas. One of the permutations of earthiness is what the French call garrigue (gare-REEG). Garrigue is the aroma… Continue reading

Get WineSpeed