Should I shake a bottle of red wine to mix in the sediment?
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Dear Dr. Vinny,
When I open a bottle of red wine, I tend to want to shake the bottle or turn it upside down to get the sediment at the bottom to mix in before I pour a glass. Am I making a big mistake?
—Mark, Fresno, Calif.
Dear Mark,
I always encourage people to enjoy their wine however they like. That said, most wine lovers (including me) would say shaking a bottle of wine isn’t the best idea.
Unlike shaking up a bottle of salad dressing, there’s no advantage to shaking a bottle of wine, whether young or old, red or white (or sparkling!). The sediment that falls out of wine is a natural byproduct of winemaking. It contains tiny bits of grape solids, spent yeast cells, tartrate crystals and phenolic molecules (including tannin polymers). Some of those molecules are responsible for the pigment in wine, which is why the color often fades in older wines as sediment accumulates.
Mixing the sediment and the wine will not reintegrate anything important back into the wine. In fact, all it will do is make the mouthfeel of your wine less pleasant. A wine full of suspended sediment particles is just going to be gritty.
Sediment isn’t harmful to drink, and a little grit in the glass isn’t the end of the world! That said, most people are careful when handling older bottles of wine—upwards of about 10 years is when you’re most likely to encounter sediment, though young wines can sometimes have a surprising amount of grit too—so that the sediment stays at the bottom of the bottle. That might mean setting a bottle upright for a couple of days before serving. You could also consider decanting your wine to make sure that gritty sediment stays out of your glass.
—Dr. Vinny