Organic Viticulture

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.

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