Joan said:
The last is the stuff that was stuck to the bottom of the two carboys. I needed my spoon handle to break it up! It's hard to see but it's "crystally" and crunchy!
Joan....I think you sure got some 'Wine Diamonds' there....Like you said it's a crystal that forms from the Tartaric Acid in the wines...aka...Cream of Tarter...guess we are not to be alarmed.
I recently made up two batches of wine using my own wine grapes...some of the steam extracted juice had hard crystals in the mason jars when I poured it into the primary.Later when I racked the wine out of the primary the sides of the buckets had deposits on the sides...rough, like a rough sand paper....Have racked the two batches yesterday to another carboy and one had little crystals and the other had a dusty residue in the bottom with the lees...like gritty...
I am afraid these wines might make crystals in the bottles...so...have been reading up on 'Wine Diamonds'..it is a sign of grapes that were ripe when picked and many 'good' wines will have it in the bottle and on the corks.
Guess you can precipitate them by cold stabilization like you did, so might have to do this to these wines to get rid of all the acid that will continue to form crystals....the last two days around here might be too cold to do it now.
Kind of fun in a way to see something different...but, I don't really want crystals in the bottles.
How long did you cold stabilize your wines????
How cold did you let them get???
At what stage of fermentaion did you do it???
Edited by: Northern Winos 
