Sometimes as you pour the last glass or two from a bottle of red wine you find sediment in your glass. Should you worry about that?
The answer is no. You are more likely to find sediment in a bottle of red wine than a white and it is normally a totally natural evolution of the wine that is nothing to worry about. Wines that are mass produced are unlikely to ‘throw’ a sediment as they age as they will have been fined (clarified) and sterile filtered before bottling. This prevents sediment from forming. Artisanal wines that have been made in a more natural manner are often bottled without fining or filtration and so will often develop a sediment over time.
The next question that comes from this is ‘should I have decanted the wine’? Well, maybe. If you decant a wine you can be sure to stop pouring when any sign of deposit of sediment appears in the neck of the bottle. However, if your bottle of wine has been standing upright for a while and you are careful as you pour, that can be fine. The main reasons for decanting are when a wine is young and needs a bit of air to open it up and when wines are older and may have developed a sediment in the bottle.
I always see it as a good sign that the wine hasn’t had too much interference in the winery. Wine is a living product and changes over time and growers committed to making great wine feel that it strips the character of a wine if you manipulate it too much.
