Wine Crystallography??

Last spring when I was visiting w/ PeterWork at Ampelos, he had at the wnry some petri-dish wine crystallography patterns of several of his wines. They were very distinctive in their character. He apparently picked up on this technique from RandallGrahm. I noticed last night on my BonnyDoon Ca d'Solo Sangiovese (rather nice rendition of Sangio I thought) that he is using these crystallography patterns on his label.
How do you go about generating those crystal patterns? What, exactly, do they
tell you? Can you distinguish between a wine that comes from a biodynamic vnyd
from one that's not?? Or one that's been RO'd vs. one that's not?? Can you use the
technique to distinguish between various varietals?? Has the technique been developed to use it as a diagnostic tool?? To detect wine frauds or such?
WineCrystals... all seems a
bit too woo-woo for us scientific types!! Looking at those patterns seems a bit
like a Doc reading a mammogram or an MRI scan...requires a lot of intuitive
background to extract any information from it. Curious minds would like to know.
Tom

Cellartracker uses an image of an '03 Ca' del Solo Sangio with no crystallography on it. Can you post an image for we unenlightened to gaze upon? If what they're doing is just letting wine dry in a Petri/crystallizing dish, they're going to get mostly tartrate crystals (I'd guess) and you might recall Pasteur's famous experiment with them, which we now understand to involve stochastic processes, so no surprise that different wines would give different patterns. The real trick would be if the same wine gave the same pattern over multiple trials

Mark Lipton

We have a collection of tartrate covered corks. They look like they could be in different crystal systems under a 10x hand lens. Maybe I should drag out the microscope for a closer look. I suspect that tartrate crystals come on many forms.

Tom;,google "Sensitive Crystallization" and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer! That'll keep you out of trouble for a few weeks...

Cellartracker uses an image of an '03 Ca' del Solo Sangio with no crystallography on it. Can you post an image for we unenlightened to gaze upon? If what they're doing is just letting wine dry in a Petri/crystallizing dish, they're going to get mostly tartrate crystals (I'd guess) and you might recall Pasteur's famous experiment with them, which we now understand to involve stochastic processes, so no surprise that different wines would give different patterns. The real trick would be if the same wine gave the same pattern over multiple trials
Mark Lipton

Mark,
If you go to the BonnyDoon WebSite (http://www.BonnyDoonVineyard.com) and look at some of the Ca d'Solo labels
there, you'll see what I'm talking about.
PeterWork had two photos of his PinotNoir crystals. One was before they went Bio and one was after. They were
dramatically different. Peter claimed (as I recall) that the crystallography supported the conversion to Bio. Couldn't
have told it by me.
The crystal growth in the petri dish is obviously stochastic in nature. Classic fractal patterns to the eye. I would guess
if you took the same wine and adjusted the acidity, the crystal fractals would probably be different.
It's a technology that seems way beyond me, though.
Tom

Tom;,google "Sensitive Crystallization" and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer! That'll keep you out of trouble for a few weeks...

Shoulda known if'n I wanted info on some of this woo-woo crystal stuff, it'd come out of Berkeley.
I'll check it out, Steve. Thanks for the lead.
Tom

http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine ... tion-.html

Nicholas Jolie is a big believer in this process. I tried to read his book once, but found it very odd and not very logical.

http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/153/Terroir-~-Sensitive-Crystallization-.html

Woo-woo indeed! Thanks for the link, Mary. I had wondered why Grahm's crystals had green deposits in them and now I know: copper salts! By the way, there are two different substances that go by the name copper chloride: cuprous and cupric chlorides, CuCl and CuCl2, respectively. I suspect that you probably had the latter, but you should probably check with someone in the know to make sure that you're using the right form of copper as well as a typical amount. Regarding the form of the crystallization patterns: make sure that none of your Petri dishes are exposed to vibration of any sort. Ideally, they should all be placed in an enclosed chamber that rests on a stable surface free of vibration. Good luck with your trials!

Mark Lipton

We have a collection of tartrate covered corks. They look like they could be in different crystal systems under a 10x hand lens. Maybe I should drag out the microscope for a closer look. I suspect that tartrate crystals come on many forms.

Yes, there were mica-like sheets, gorgeous cubic crystals in perfect double pyramids, and other various crsytal forms .

You should also be able to see patterns if you put a drop of the liquid on a glass slide with a cover slip over the liquid then use a transmitted light microscope with a polarizing lens that you can pull in and out, and a revolving base that you put the slide on. The ones we used at the geology dept were used for rock and mineral identification, but can - and were sometimes - used for liquids too. The liquids move and the patterns can become a little psychedelic. One guy used to come into the lab and do it with some kind of sugared water. He always smelt of dope. Never thought of doing it with wine - although I did crush up some of the tartrates you mention and run them through an xray diffraction machine - the result, funnily enough, was complex tartrates - differnt coloured deposits had different patterns.

You also see crystal deposits on the insides of old wine barrels. Remember, we saw some at the garden centre up the road.

Cheers,
Sue