The No Sediment Bottle?

According to The Guardian online, a celebrated Spanish chef claims to have invented a wine bottle that captures sediment. Martín Berasategui, (three Michelin star chef), has added a chamber to the bottle to the bottom of the bottle ensuring that no sediment reaches your glass when poured. Berasategui also claims the shape of the bottle could do away with decanting.

"The bottle itself acts as a decanter thanks to its special shape," Berasategui wrote in a recent blog posting.

The Adegas Moure winery (Spain) is already experimenting with the bottle for some of their higher-end line of wines. "It means we can treat the wine in a more natural fashion, with less intervention," said José Manuel Moure from the winery.

My Thoughts…

First off, the bottle in the photo looks like it weighs 15 lbs! I can therefore only rationally assume that the guy in the photo is a body builder. The main problem that I see is the increased weight would add a fair amount of cost to the package, not to mention the associated carbon footprint from transport, two highly talked about issues in the wine industry over recent years.

Call me “old school”, but I actually welcome a little sediment in my glass. I take any sign of a gritty substance in the bottle as a sign of quality and not concern! For the most part it means that a wine has gone through less intense (if any) fining or filtration, processes which some claim (including me) strips a wine of its character. This along the same lines as tartaric crystals (which is just cream of tartar and mainly found in white wines), a naturally occurring substance which looks like small “wine crystals”.

I’ve been giving the concept of the No Sediment bottle some thought, and contrary to my initial opinion I am going to give 2 thumbs up for the idea!

My rationale is that (and I have completed no official study on this), but I would say that 99% of the public doesn’t truly understand what sediment is. I still come across people who think that a wine is faulty for throwing sediment. I therefore suggest that education is the way forward!

Wineries (and I’m sure there will be a small handful) who plan on adopting the bottle need to have a sales pitch that resembles something like this:

“Here at XYZ winery we are committed to producing natural, hand-crafted, small-production wines. We employ minimal fining or filtration in our production, processes which we believe strips a wine of all its character. A number of our bottles will therefore throw a sediment, a substance which we consider to be a sign of a well-made wine, and a completely harmless naturally occurring byproduct. We therefore use this 15 lb wine bottle to ensure that no sediment enters your glass.”

Et voila, the perfect pitch for the No Sediment bottle! Although you may want to adjust that last sentence accordingly, I’m just guessing the weight of the bottle. Joking aside, the more people talking about fining, filtration and sediment the better in my opinion!

The one claim that I will take issue with is the idea that the No Sediment bottle will replace decanters altogether. That’s just complete garbage, and I’m not even going to waste time debating it. We can save that for another article…