Nowadays I never even decant. Forget about filtering. But I drink mature wines mostly, 20 - 25 years-old or more, which have been resting in the cellar, and I always slow-O, which provides, to my tastes, a wine with greater subtlety, complexity, and vitality than does decanting, where the initial hit of oxygen when pouring creates a subtle âbluntingâ of the complexity and vitality that makes a fine mature wine so excellent. This is the result of Monsieur Audouzeâs influence, and I agree completely with his methods and observations. This is with mature Burgs and Bordeaux. Younger wines, or different wines, may respond more positively to decantingâŚ
So, PaulâŚyou just pour the sludge/sediment into your glassâŚWaitâŚyou do get it out of the bottle into a glass, right? You didnât say. Do you use a straw to drink the wine? If notâŚarenât you trading all that sludge for the purported âbluntingâ?
This is a serious postâŚI am curious how you reconcile that with having clean wine-- as you are talking exclusively about aerationâŚnot filtering?
Iâm not sure you can definitively say that Andy. Port contains both fine sediment and the big bulky stuff. In your experiment, the big bulky stuff would have still been confined to the bottom of the bottle, but the fine sediment certainly would have been dislodged from the starting and stopping of the pouring process going across the three decanters. Itâs the first one poured, in this case the free-hand pour, that would be spared from any fine sediment. The other two pouring tests would have had fine sediment exposed to them.
I donât agree that it âsurelyâ indicates anything more than a group of people taking a survey on a wine board say they donât actually use paper filters. Heck, I took the survey, and I donât use paper filters. That doesnât mean I reject them. I simply donât use them because I have a stainless mesh filter that seems to work fine for my purposes.
The conclusion simply doesnât follow from the data.
I agree, JohnâŚitâs the fine stuff that usually the problem, both taste wise and ability to get it out with less severe filtering. Of course, free hand clean wine is best. Thereâs nothing to do to filter that , as there is nothing to filter.
A fairer test would be to filter the top through coffee filterâŚand free pour the bottom part. put the middle part through whatever one considers more benign filtration (but since the coffee filter is the most severe mentioned here and since even that will not filter out all of the fine sediment -in my experienceââŚhow could the less severe really do anything?) âŚthe problem is that stopping in the middle to go to the various decanters for respective portions would jolt the sediment into suspension and pollute those portions.
Again, except we kept the bottle tilted on its side as much as possible as all the decanters were lined up next to each other. Tilting only enough to stop the pour as we moved from one decanter to the next. There was a lot of thought put into it prior to commencing the experiment, to mitigate as much as possible, the issues brought up here. Is it 100% conclusive? Of course not, as I mentioned a couple did prefer the other methods. But the results were very interesting.
Any really old wine, even those which are fined and filtered, will eventually throw some kind of fine or even course sediment over time. There will also be some amount suspended in the wine that doesnât settle on the bottom*. Is that bad? IMO, no the super fine sediment doesnât affect the wine. Besides, short of using a super fine filtering media, such as coffee filter paper, one would be hard pressed to keep even the fine stuff out. But if youâre using coffee paper then you are allowing only the smallest particles present to pass through. I believe that hurts the wine to some degree, as our test results showed.
*Iâve had a prominent wine and Port producer tell me the super fine sediment from very old bottled wines/Ports can take upwards of 8-12 months to totally settle out once disturbed â as in moving the bottle from itâs racking, moving to where youâre going to open it, and from a lying to a standing position. Not sure about you, but I donât have that much pre-planning or patience to stand up a bottle 8 months early. Iâll just stick to freehanding as much as possible then cheesecloth to catch most of the sediment
Stuart,
I donât find âsludgeâ in my wines, except for older Ports. Sediment is usually quite compacted in bottles that have been resting undisturbed, at least that is what I find with my Burgs and Bordeaux. Maybe the lengthy slow-O also tends to soften the taste of any slight sediment in the final glass? Once sediment gets âoldâ, i.e. when the molecules have agglomerated (?) into longer chains that are not astringent like youthful short-chain tannins, I rarely find them really bothersome. But that may be the structure or nature of my taste buds, where I donât find this offensive?
I do, however, remember encountering a âcloudyâ bottle of somewhat younger Burgundy years ago, where I decided the suspended sediment definitely affected the wine in a negative way. But if I transport a Burg, or have one delivered, I will always let it rest, standing up at an angle, for two weeks minimum. The fine sediment that may be present in Burgs can take that long to settle out! And I avoid opening Burgs or Bordeaux from vintages where I expect a denser or fuller-bodied wine, even from vintages that are 20 - 25 years old, first because such wines will not be âmatureâ yet and will likely gain from further celllar time, and also because they wonât respond to slow-O in any reasonable amount of time! So these may need to be decanted to reduce their âvitalityâ. But when a wine gets older and more delicate, that âvitalityâ becomes more fragile and responds better to a gentler approach I thinkâŚ
PaulâŚalmost all of the red Burgs and Bordeaux I open are over 15 years oldâŚand often over 20. They almost all have âsludgeâ and it is like a paste in the coffee filter. I often taste it. I would expect that, esp. since I have never bought from any of the negotiants-- or from producers who sterile (or close to sterile) filter their wines.
That they are not âbothersomeâ to you âŚis , I think, unsual. I think thatâs why this thread exists. Otherwise, there would be not need to filter any wine.
Well, this has taken a very pleasantly wonderful and thankfully more serious tone - thank you!
Youâll not see Bill on this thread again because now we are really and truly getting to the heart of the matter - whatâs a reasonable way to filter wine at home (assuming you want to) without illogical hysterics.
The personal irony is that I have only needed to filter CdP, which I donât really ever drink anymore.
Then why did you show up here and waste everybodyâs time, Yaacov? Ironic, indeed. The rest of us have been discussing rational decanting possibilities the entire time. You seem to prefer senseless pissing contestsâŚ
I knew youâd come back. And I knew that you wouldnât post anything of relevance to the discussion. But I do appreciate your consistency.
Back to the discussion, just decanted a 2010 st joseph from faury - it had some very fine sediment, but not enough for me to typically filter it. But used a coffee filter to do half the bottle, and the rest into a separate decanter. Zero difference. Need to find some other wines. The wine is great however, so I still win.
Bill and everyone arguing coffee⌠You should educate yourself on extraction ratios. Fines left in French Presses create a wildly inconsistent cup.
Paper, vacuum press, and very very fine metal filters can all possible achieve a perfect consistent cup. A french press might⌠with a perfect, sifted grind but many home consumers wouldnât have the grinder required to do so.
Lastly I would say the vast majority of the world lags behind the US, Australia, and Nordic regions regarding coffee.
One thing I try to avoid is deposit along the length of the bottle - i.e. the ânormalâ situation. This sort of deposit is easy to disturb when pouring. So I will check older bottles that I may want to drink soon and if they have deposit like that I will twist them sharply by the neck to dislodge the sediment and then stand them up at a slight angle, with the front label âupâ, so all the sediment will re-settle into the bottom âbackâ corner of the bottle. After a week or so Iâll lay them back down in horizontal storage. Later, pouring carefully, with the front label âupâ, I can pretty much empty the bottle without disturbing the sediment.
You know, this might be totally off the wall, but Iâve often wondered, why donât we store bottles weâre pretty sure weâre going to drink in the next 1-3 years upright?
Not off the wall at all, John. It is common sense rarely discussed or applied by wine board denizens! With Nebbiolo, you absolutely should, John, and probably with all bottles that throw considerable sediment. The 55-degree, on-the-side business is so much crap and voodoo science at one level of analysis. Perhaps smart if you are going to resell your wine in mint condition one day, but it makes no sense at all for bottles sure to be consumed in a given year. Sound corks will not dry out and fail in a year. I did not say so, but I absolutely reject the Zylberberg contention that fine sediment does not settle when applied bottles of old Nebbiolo. The collective drinking experience of the old Nebbioloheads conclusively proves otherwise. (Ask Bill Boykin how long his bottles stand for.) Filtering may still be required, but you can pour clear wine after standing the bottle up for an extended period, which is not likely possible with the During method (although his approach is also one calculated to keep sediment only in one area of the bottle), and rarely possible if a bottle stored on its side is moved, popped and poured, or opened after recent shipping. No two bottles of wine are alike, of course, but old Nebbiolo almost always poses the sediment problem, which is why restaurants and wine shops here store so many bottles upright.
Dan, good article, but the relevant tangent to coffee was SOLELY the efficacy of using paper coffee filters to filter wine. Coffee has its own science, real and voodoo, just like wine, and I suspect, even though it was not fully developed here because of the persistence of many in discussing wine instead of coffee, that everybody on this thread understands that an American cup of joe is not an espresso, and that quality coffee brewing depends upon, quite literally, too many variables to EVER have total control over all of them, starting from the moment a coffee tree flowers. A consistent cup is not necessarily the best cup or even a good cup, even though replication of a cup of coffee that one enjoys is (or should be) the laudable end result of all coffee science and technology. Taylor and I mentioned French press not as the be-all, end-all of coffee-making, but rather, as a technique capable of making richer, better-tasting coffee than a Mr. Coffee with a paper filter, so maybe, just maybe, a Mr. Coffee filter may be trapping more from your coffee, or your wine, than you want trapped. And hey, letâs face it, an overwhelming number of people prefer a Mr. Coffee machine using shitty, industrial coffee to any of the literally hundreds of better options. They want a jolt of caffeine and something hot and comforting in the morning, and they know it ainât going to be Scarlett Johansson! There is no relevant dispute to be had in the coffee arena.
The point is FILTRATION, period, and in this thread, the filtration of wine at the home, not winery, level. By any definition that one cares to use, the purpose of filtrationâŚbe it wine, coffee, data, chemical compounds, resumes, ANYTHINGâŚis the separation of unwanted components from the whole being subjected to filtration. To that end, I think that the âno filteringâ crowd here has the philosophical winner, on the assumption that, given that none of us has the knowledge, equipment or technical skills required to filter out specific micro-components in a bottle of wine that he or she might personally find undesirable, it is probably best to experience the wine just as the winemaker intended, and then decide whether we find it good, bad or indifferent on that basis. The central idea of this thread is that there is often unpleasant garbage (albeit natural by-products) at the bottom of some wine bottles which, if they make it into the glass, can ruin the whole wine-drinking experience. If filtering is therefore essential in a given case, the point of this thread is to explore how best to filter. The assumption of most, whether right or wrong, is that the less the filtration process impacts the wine, the better the wine will be. Whether âbetterâ or not, it will absolutely be truest to the winemakerâs intention. There can NO scientific argument against that assumption, and no convincing scientific proof in its favor. It comes down to the individualâs palate preferences and limitations in the end, just as it does with coffee and everything else that we eat and drink. However, it does have the power of logic and common sense going for it.
So where does that leave the Great Coffee Filter Debate? Here: it stands to reason that, if the goal is solely to trap unwanted solids, as it is here, inert or nearly inert filtration materials of an appropriate design will trap LESS of the overall substance passing through it than will materials, like paper, that have the potential, in the case of liquids like wine at least, to ABSORB the liquid passing through it and perhaps desirable components, as well as trapping the unwanted solids. (Throwing a stack of resumes down a staircase and hiring the candidates whose resumes float all the way to the bottom does not work well, either, by the way. That is how law firms and investment banks choose their employees.) We can leave for another day the science of designing a paper filter that will trap, say, old Nebbiolo sediment and nothing else. (Given the fact that no wine sediment could possibly be uniform in size and shape, and the fact that the nature of sediment varies from wine to wine and bottle to bottle, there is likely zero possibility of designing a perfect wine filter from paper or any other substance, and even the Zylberberg Pipette and the Zylberberg Centrifuge will ultimately fail to eliminate 100% of the sediment.) We can also dispense with the argument as to whether or not a superior-quality, no-undesirable-impact coffee filter can be or has been designed. The debate, thus framed, comes down to this: if one has to filter, will a material like stainless steel, nylon or another inert synthetic material capable of being formed into a very fine mesh filter wine less intrusively than a supermarket-grade coffee filter? If the answer to that is not self-evident, seems to me that beer, distilled spirits or soft drinks might be better choices for the filtererâŚ
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