Cream of Tartar

Did you know that angel food cakes & souffles exist partly because of wine?

Those lucky individuals who have been given tours of our winery might already know this.  It usually depends on if you happen to be visiting during one of our white wine 'cold stabilization' periods or not.

One of the key ingredients to baking powder, and an egg white stabilizer by itself, is Cream of Tartar, or tartaric acid.  I happened to pull out the Cream of Tartar from my spice pantry today, and I read the side of it:

"Cream of Tartar is a pure, natural ingredient that's created as grape juice turns to wine."

I was looking at my jar of Spice Islands Cream of Tartar, so I investigated their website.  They took the description even further.

"Tartaric acid, or cream of tartar, is the natural byproduct of fermented grapes, collected from the wall of the casks used to age fine wines.  Naturally reddish-brown in color, it's carefully refined until it achieves its signature white color, earning it the name "cream" of tartar.  Cream of Tartar is a key ingredient in baking powder and adds a fluffiness and stability to egg white dishes such as meringues."

We come across crystallized tartaric acid when we chill our white wines down to 29 degrees Fahrenheit.  We do this at the end of our white wine-making process, just before filtering and bottling, so that these "wine diamonds" don't eventually precipitate out into our bottled wines.  The crystals form all the way around our cooled tanks, and I guess we could collect them and crush them down to Cream of Tartar if we really wanted to.  Instead, we spend hours scrubbing them off the inner walls of the tanks and disposing of them.

These crystals could occur in our wine bottles if we didn't go through the extra cold-stabilization process.  These are examples of what "wine diamonds" look like, though not in our wine bottles:

So this summer when you're eating a delicious lemon meringue pie, give a silent nod to wine for making it possible.

We happen to be cold-stabilizing some white wine right now,
The Winemaker's Apprentice