Wine Lees

French chefs occasionally refer to using the sediment at the bottom of the oak casks used to age wine as a thickener for red wine sauces. Reliable recipes are difficult to track down, but for someone living in a vineyard area, it would be a worthwhile experiment to whisk a few tablespoons of these lees into an unbound brown sauce or red wine sauce base. Lees from Pinot Noir would be best in keeping with the Burgundian tradition.