Barbara Zaragoza of Seattle writes to say: “The other day I ordered a glass of Washington syrah at the Coronado Hotel in San Diego. It was terribly acidic, but I drank it anyway. When I got to the bottom of the glass, I found a lot of fine sharp dark-colored crystals, like shards of broken glass. When I complained to the waitress, she told me that ‘all Washington syrahs do that.’ I love a good syrah, and I’ve never seen anything like this before. What’s going on?”

Funny business, if you ask Dr. Food. Wines carrying a lot of dissolved acids can “throw” a sediment of precipitated tartaric acid, but you usually see such sediment only in white wines. When a red wine shows such sediment, it’s almost certainly a sign that the wine was subject at some point in its journey from winery to restaurant to severe cold: probably by being left on a loading dock somewhere when the temperature dipped toward freezing or below. Encountering such sediment can be disconcerting but it’s completely harmless. Not so your waitress’ conduct: When you pointed out the sediment in your glass, she should have taken the glass right back to the wine steward and taken the charge off your bill or at least offered you another glass of wine in apology.

Have a question for Dr. Food? E-mail drfood@seattleweekly.com. If yours is chosen for publication, you, like Zaragoza, will receive a complimentary copy of The Seattle Best Places Cookbook from Sasquatch Books.