Cold Stabilization and "Wine Diamonds"

We are in the depths of winter, it’s certainly cold outside, and mother nature is still letting it snow. This provides the perfect opportunity for timely wine making topics! “‘Tis the season for cold stabilization”, as they say. As familiar as that saying may be, you might not be as sure about the “how” and “why” of this particular part of the wine making process. Have you ever refrigerated a wine and later notice certain undesirable particles floating around the bottom of the bottle? In the wine making world, we refer to them as “wine diamonds”.

Cold stabilization is important to reduce the wine diamonds that can magically appear after a bottle is refrigerated. This is simply tartaric acid that naturally occurs in grapes (like citric acid in an orange or malic acid in an apple) that has a way of showing up once oxygen hits the wine and subsequently drops to a certain temperature. Cold stabilization helps us remove the majority of it by temporarily moving the bulk wine outside and filtering back in after a week or so, leaving the diamonds behind. Fortunately in Missouri, we are blessed with the largest freezer in the world- for free!

Of course, this is a very old fashioned way of doing it and they make a chemical to prevent the wine diamonds from forming, but we prefer to put less chemicals into our wine for a more natural, finished product. Even if a few of the “diamonds” make it into a bottle, they are perfectly safe. Aside from literally moving the wine outside when it’s frigid, another alternative is the utilization of glycol chillers and jackets that go around the tanks- this accomplishes the same thing with the push of a button. This is how most larger wineries complete stabilization (if they don’t use a chemical). Some day maybe we will be able to do the same, but until then, we will dream and toil away the “good old fashioned way”:

It’s a cold process for the winemakers but worth it to make wine we believe in, using some of the oldest techniques. And we have plenty of wine to warm us up while we work on it!

Cheers.