"Bill" > wrote in message
...
>
> I received a shipment of wine today and there was a last minute note
> in the box about "Wine Diamonds" which are tartrate crystals. I gather
> the wine in my box contains Wine Diamonds. The note goes on to say that
> in Europe these sediment crystals are appreciated as a sign that the
> wine is natural.

Utter nonsense! What do they mean by "natural"?

Indeed I have had three different merchants in
> Germany say the wine is highly prized if it has the crystals. It was
> always in the winter when they were trying to sell me these wines and
> my feeling was that the wine had gotten very cold for the first time
> and caused the crystals to precipitate out. I think that cold
> processing of white wines here in the US gets rid of them totally.

Your "feeling" is correct. Small wineries frequently don't bother with cold
stabilizing their wines, either because of the extra expense of running the
refrigeration or because they simply don't _have_ it. Big wineries here in
the US either cold stabilize by chilling and seeding the wine to precipitate
the bitartrate or by ion exchange.

Anyway, the point is there is nothing inherently better about wines with
bitartrate crystals in the bottle. OTOH, there is nothing bad about them
either. It's a cosmetic issue.

> OK this is a subject for some European comment.

I'm of European _descent_. Will that do? ;^)

Tom S