please elaborate on why you feel that coffee filter is too much filtering. i’ve done for this years and never felt anything was missing.
I work for a company that makes these filters and have tried them and they basically wreck the wine as the ones we make have much too small of a pore size. .45um and .2um. It might be OK if you could find filters that are 3-5um but even then I don’t know…
George
okay, did some further research because I felt that a paper coffee filter was totally safe to use on wine and there’s at least one comment above that says that it’s too fine and will strip out something. Seems the industry standard for sterile filtering wines is 0.45 microns, while the average coffee filter is around 20 microns.
For the last 20 years or so, I’ve filtered almost every red wine with sediment through a brown paper coffee filter, as I think sediment (the kind from precipitated out tannins) can mar an otherwise good wine. I do try to pour until the sediment shows up with a strong flashlight under the bottle neck…and only then filter…and try to leave the finest sediment in the bottle.
“Filtration” used to be one of RP’s bugaboos in red wine. But, putting wine through a coffee filter is not what Parker was talking about. The real “filters” the winemakers used in France in the 80s and 90’s was much much less pourous. (I asked one winemaker in Burgundy for the lightest filter to take home for one of my seminars/courses, and it was visually impenetrable; much less porous; I could only imagine what a more severe one was like.)
Look at all the gunk a coffee fitler catches. That stuff won’t help the taste of a wine if swimming in it. Metal filters don’t catch as much…(Of course, not all sediment is a problem; some is purposefully left in. But, with an aged, tannic red wine…you can’t try to select out which is which.)
I’ve tried to find a better device while in Burgundy several times, but…have never come up with anything better than the paper coffee filter.
Maybe I’m thinking of different filters - the ones we used were disigned to get clay-sized colloids out of suspension but not strip the wine-sized things like little tiny bits of Fe-Mn coatings that had been released from those clays. Though I wonder if the right answer here isn’t a quick centrifuging. You could pipette the wine into glass (already helpful in isolating from sediment, if you’ve let the fines settle) and then out that glass into a 'fuge for a quick spin. You don’t need true labgrade material, so I bet you could get a pipette and centrifuge for about $250 all in.
Another vote here for cheesecloth. I don’t like paper filters because the flow seems to go slower and slower as the filter gets saturated, to the point that nothing flows through it. Ron Kramer’s tea strainer looks interesting.
A hint about paper coffee filters: serious COFFEE drinkers never use them, because of what is left behind in the paper. Ever see an espresso machine with a paper filter? French press? Moka? Keurig, Nespresso or similar capsule machines?
Mr. Coffee-style machines use paper filters, and even there, most of those at the high end come with gold mesh filters. Bunn-o-Matic machines in your local 7-11s and chain restaurants use paper filters. Melitta funnel pots use paper filters. I am guessing it could be because Melitta’s business is selling paper filters. (They are even trying to sell them for Keurig-style machines. I wish them luck.) And Melitta pots were really cool and really popular…30 years ago. They have gone the way of the percolator and Maxwell House coffee in the 21st century. This is not one of the scientific or pseudo-scientific arguments that are favored here…just common sense. Given only the two choices, I would take the Zylberberg centrifuge over the paper coffee filter, although I think that using a centrifuge may be taking wine, and the ability of the human palate to taste, just a little too seriously…
.2um is sterile filtration. .45um is clarification. That being said that is for medical research and I would guess that a wine makers idea of sterile is different than in a research lab. .45um will not filter out most bacteria.
George
Patently false statement above, Chemex and other pour over techniques all use filters. And they are among the most serious coffee brewing methods.
Serious, maybe, whatever that means in context. Best? Absolutely not. (Melitta sells grinders, capsules and other non-pour-over technology to survive these days, by the way.) There is not a patently false statement to be found above, Yaacov. Of course, people prefer what they prefer in their coffee, just as they do in beer, wine, or Coke products. (The French drink coffee-flavored water much of the time.) The issue is whether supermarket-grade paper coffee filters can take away sediment without robbing the wine poured through them of anything else (including wine). My point is that I very much doubt that. Pour-over coffee-making seems to me an easy, lowest-common-denominator technique that represented a vast improvement over percolators and stovetop pots, which burned coffee. Coffee-making has come a long way since pour-over technology came along, and likewise, there are a multitude of other safer, less extreme possibilities for separating sediment from wine. Why would one want to soak a coffee filter with old, rare and possibly very expensive wine? Do you squeeze or chew the filter afterward to extract some benefit from the trapped wine? Do you squeeze the filter to get all of the bottle to pass through the filter in the first place? Does it seem like either of those options is optimal treatment of the wine?
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Sorry, Bill, Yaacov’s right, some extreme coffee geeks use the methods like V60 pour-over, which use paper filters.
I don’t filter wine, though. Stand the bottle up a day ahead, and decant carefully.
Just for the sake of argument, Oliver (and you know that I live for the sake of argument), how does the use of V60 pour-over by “some extreme wine geeks” make that the gold standard of coffee-making? Far more people use Mr. Coffees, Keurig and even Chemex/Melitta, but I submit to you that that fact does not make those methods the gold standard, either. You know any top-flight coffee houses with V60 pour-over barristas? Or, shifting gears, knowing that you spend time here, ever try to buy a Chemex and filters in the Piemonte? (I haven’t, but searching for a French press for a friend gave me a run for my money a few years ago.) Lastly, please tell me that your V60 geeks can be found in Italy or some other locale where excellent coffee is the norm, not a fad, and not just Seattle or New York City. 
Of course (but conceding nothing), the real issue here is using a coffee filter on wine, not on coffee, there being a lot less at stake with coffee.
While a day of standing may do the trick on wines with little or no sediment or sediment which sheets, old Nebbiolo needs a hell of a lot more time than a day to have any chance at all of avoiding its bitter, nasty sediment. Not filtering is a legitimate choice, of course, but a week to, say, oh, six months makes a lot more sense for standing time. I doubt that I own many bottles for which a day would do anything at all at this point…
This thread, the how long should shipped wine rest thread: I love reading wine voodoo.
This. Everything else is overkill IMHO.
Some friends and I, along with a couple prominent Port producers, did an experiment to test the issue of using unbleached cheesecloth, unbleached coffee filters, and free-hand. We used one older Vintage Port Magnum for the test. The same shape decanters, prepared the same way, were used so there would be no difference in how the decanters were prepared or how much air the wine may have gotten from using different sized decanters.
We decanted part of it freehand. Second was cheesecloth, third was through the coffee paper. The decanters were labeled 1/2/3 and served single blind by wait staff so no one knew what order they were served in.
The vast majority overwhelming preferred the free-hand pour. A close second behind was decanting through the unbleached cheesecloth. A very distant third was through the coffee paper.
It was agreed by most that the coffee paper stripped the wine of the fruit and gave it an sharp alcoholic streak.
The results of our test showed free-hand is best. When that is not practical then unbleached cheesecloth was the second best method to use. Avoid coffee filters at all cost.
Bill,
I understand that you haven’t seen it, but it still exists. And that was ‘extreme coffee geeks,’ not wine geeks. ‘Pour-over’ is one of the ways of making coffee most favored by ‘top-flight coffee houses.’ Italians IME don’t use any coffee method other than espresso or Moka-pot, i.e. they don’t drink ‘long’ coffee.
you said serious coffee drinkers don’t use filters, I proved that was a false statement. The rest is irrelevant.
I’m open to the idea that a commercial coffee filters robs wines of something, but I’d like to have some scientific proof. My personal experience is to the contrary, but my results might not be typical.
Yep. Usually not necessary, but when it is needed this is the only way to go.
I use a fine stainless steel mesh screen while decanting when I observe that the wine needs filtering, but I’ve also got a gold mesh coffee filter that might be worth a try, it will filter quite a bit smaller particles than the mesh screen.
Generally I just let the wine stand for a day or two then carefully decant but there may be some wines (e.g. Nebbiolo, which I now have in the cellar) which require much longer standing and/or the finer filtering offered by a non-reactive metal coffee filter.