The other night I cracked a bottle of something dry & red. I forget right now what the grape was. At the bottom of the bottle, I found the small crystals shown in these photos: one for scale & one for detail. They’re definitely not the small tannic acid crystals that you sometimes find on the bottom of the cork (or floating in the wine) that are caused by storing wine at a too cold temperature. They are something else entirely. Extremely hard, very sharp edges, beautiful burgundy color, no taste, and obviously not water soluble. I’m stumped.
I’ve seen those in wine before. They’ve always been much, much smaller than these things. And adhered to the bottom of the cork. I didn’t take a picture of the cork, but it showed no evidence of crystal growth.
If that’s what they are, though, any ideas how, or why, they’re happened to grow to such a large size?
I think I might take them to the wine shop and ask those guys if they’ve seen anything else this large.
I did a quick GIS and saw some that looked closer in size on a picture of a cork. Most of them are a lot smaller though, and I’ve never seen any larger than your average refined sugar crystal. But that little ones occur from cold stabilization, so maybe if your bottle partially froze during transport it would make more and larger ones (and perhaps that would explain why it’s not on the cork).
I looked up “wine diamonds” (a nickname for the crystals) and someone on a wine Q&A site described them as “pebbles”. That sounds bigger than the usual description of “like sand”, so I guess they can be bigger.
Snazzy!
ETA: Oh, wait I was just reading that cold stabilization is supposed to prevent wine diamonds. :: shrug :: Still fits the description though.
No Vintage. I just happened to have a photo of the label on my camera. Might be a bottling year on the backside. I think it’s still in the trash can at home. I’ll look tonight.
Quartz’s link says they dissolve in warm or hot water. Nevertheless, I think you should make them into earrings and give them to your amour for Valentine’s Day.
I may try to dissolve the small one then. I dropped on in room temp water for a short time last night with no effect. Maybe the water wasn’t warm enough, or I didn’t leave it in there sufficiently long.
