Can Mountain Lion take a sleeping Mac and write the RAM to disk after a timeout?

According to the pmset man page,

hibernatemode = 3 (binary 0011) by default on supported portables. The system will store a copy of memory to persistent storage (the disk), and will power memory during sleep. The system will wake from memory, unless a power loss forces it to restore from disk image.

But then also

standby causes kernel power management to automatically hibernate a machine after it has slept for a specified time period. This saves power while asleep. This setting defaults to ON for supported hardware. The setting standby will be visible in pmset -g if the feature is supported on this machine.

standby only works if hibernation is turned on to hibernatemode 3 or 25.

(which it is by default on supported portables)

standbydelay specifies the delay, in seconds, before writing the hibernation image to disk and powering off memory for Standby.

On my machine, with settings that I believe are default, when I type pmset -g |grep standbydelay I get the result of 4200, meaning that after 70 minutes of sleep, the machine cuts power to the memory and restores from the memory image saved to the hard drive.

If your settings do not look like this, the pmset command just might be your new friend.