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Anyone fancy explaining this term, on which Ports it is a part of the process, and how it is done.

It came up in one of Toms Tawny Tasting Notes, and it's a new one to me.

Unless I am missing something, cold filtering and stabilising are essentially the same process.

Wine (and whisky) tends to become cloudy when the temperature drops.

When the temperature warms up again, some, but not all of the solid material dissolves again, so the wine remains a little cloudy. In time this tends to fall out as sediment, but it can spoil the appearance.

If you chill the wine and then filter it whilst cold, the solid matter forms and is then filtered out, leaving the wine reliably clear.

The process has the drawback of stripping some flavour from the wine, and many, (serious whisky drinkers in particular) hold the process in contempt.

Tom

Cheers Tom, I knew a bit about Cold Filtering. They even use that as a gimmick for beers nowadays, but I'd just not heard the Stabilising phrase before.

Alan

Some of the fats soluble in 60% alcohol aren’t soluble at 40%: hence the preference for cask-strength whisky, even though one dilutes it at home.

Some of the fats soluble in 40% at 20°C aren’t soluble in 40% at 3°C. So, to prevent whisky appearing cloudy in the bottle (and hence ‘off’ (as if that were possible), and hence unattractive to purchasers), it is chill-filtered.

As Uncle Tom says: “hold the process in contempt†.

reminds me of a beer I made a few months back..


time to give it a shot =)

Cherry beer next!