So here’s a weird one. I opened a nearly 40 yr old bottle of Bordeaux tonight, and as expected, there was a decent amount of sediment. I decanted off the clear wine and was left with some sediment filled dregs.
After all the clear wine was consumed, I poured the dregs into a glass and gave it sniff. To me, it smelled the same as the clean sediment-free wine that I’d been enjoying all night. Is this always the case? It looked like I had a glass of mud, and yet, the aromas were fine. I’ve honestly never given it much thought, but I was left thinking: given how strong wine sediment tastes, I’m surprised that I’ve never noticed a smell to them. Maybe I just haven’t bothered to notice before.
I think this is not just an interesting academic question, but also one that has potential relevance to the drinking experience. We obviously try to avoid sediment when drinking older wines bc of the impact on texture and flavor, but could the presence of sediment affect the nose of a wine as well? We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of getting more sediment into our glass than we’d like, and it would be good to know if the nose was being affecting as well as the flavors.
Thank you all for indulging such an off-beat question,
Noah
The dregs are non-soluble solids that settle over time, some yeast cells, organic acids, color molecules; but the main thing is they are solid form. Solids don’t have much aroma. The liquid wine that saturates them is where the aromas are coming from. Let the dregs dry out in a coffee filter or similar for a few weeks in open air. They won’t have much aroma left, but they will taste nasty.
Not sure if this answers the question, but it’s my take on it.
The impact of sediment is purely textural. By that I include the textural elements of taste, especially astringency. Sediment can be crunchy and astringent or bitter but it has essentially no aromatic character.
Ok so now the exceptions. I should say that this applies to bottle sediment and not lees in barrel or tank, which can get stinky. Some natural wines that are bottled young and cloudy could, in theory, have a stinky sulfide character to the leesy bottle sediment, but in reality I’ve never really seen this. However, wines that have accidentally refermented in bottle, or some undisgorged pet nats, can have a bunch of dead yeast at the bottom that impart an aroma when poured into a glass, typically a yeasty one.
This. One has to differentiate tastes from flavors. Taste is something you just taste with your tongue, ie. it must be one of the basic tastes, like sweet, bitter, acidic, salty, etc. Flavors are smells (ie. volatile compounds) that are perceived retronasally and brain re-interprets them as a taste. As these solids are, well, solid - and not volatile - they don’t have any smell and consequently no flavor to them. Their impact is only on the taste and on the texture, not on the smell.
But this stinky sulfide character isn’t the smell of lees, either. It’s just reduction, ie. the lees gob up any oxygen from the wine, including oxygen from compounds that contain oxygen and sulfur. When robbed of oxygen, these sulfur-containing compounds can suddenly become volatile ie. you can smell them! However, it’s not the lees you’re smelling, just the effect they can have on the wine. The smelly compounds were already there in the wine.
Yes and no. The autolysing yeast cells release compounds into the wine that reduce the redox state of the wine, which can cause the formation of sulfides either from the breakdown of larger sulfur-containing compounds or potentially through the reduction of residual elemental sulfur in a wine which, as a solid, can settle into the lees itself. So, as you say, it’s the effect the lees have on the wine, but in the absence of stirring, the main body of the wine itself can remain healthy but the interstitial spaces between the solids in the lees can become increasingly reductive because there is limited liquid - and oxygen - transfer between the increasingly compact pore space in the lees and the main bulk of the wine. You could rack off those lees a lovely wine and then notice, when washing out the barrel or tank or trying to collect the lees to save, that they smell terrible.
I hesitated to bring this example up because it’s not bottle sediment, but it can be the result of sedimentation in a barrel or tank.