Decanting wine . What is it? Is it even necessary?
You do not need wine courses for the answers to these age old questions.
Decanting wine is simply pouring you wine into another container with the concept of letting your wine aerate or mix with oxygen. The concept is that “letting the wine breath ‘ will enhance your flavor.
Do this work? Does this do any good at all? Well let’s find out.
Like most practices, they are based on fact or information that was important way back. You have to realize that wine not like anything else, perhaps besides baseball, is steeped during the past with custom.
I believe most people still need to understand a certain romantic aspect to wine.
But winemaking, like most industries has modernized. Tiny local family owned wineries might still use some of the more conventional methods in making their wines, but they are definitely a minority.
What this actually means is that something that was necessary to do to wine a hundred years ago, in most cases is not necessary today.
Way back, most wines were not filtered, implying tiny remaining pieces of yeast from the fermentation process would over time settle in the base of the bottle.
They have no taste or don’t hurt the wine in any way, but they don’t look extremely appealing. So that the low tech answer was to simply decant the wine into another container and leave the little amount of sediment in the bottle. Problem answered.
My personal guess is that some clever marketing type turned this negative into a positive by claiming that because they decanted, their wine was better.
When in reality they were just distracting people from the sediment. I mean actually, who wants to look at wine cooties? I don’t. I’ll bet you don’t either!
In modern winemaking, this sediment is filtered out before bottling. So except in extreme cases, when it is the winemakers choice not to filter, you can never see sediment in the base of modern wine bottles.
So what about decanting to let the wine breath.
Before winemaking was modernised, many wines were aged in caves and sometimes the corks could pick up smells.
The reason you let the wine breath was to dispel any of those unwanted scents. Most bottles did not have the plastic bottle tops we use today.
Today, most wines are stockpiled in climate controlled warehouses and capped with a plastic cork cover. As well as just looking nicer, the plastic bottle cap helps keep the cork and bottle free from outside scents.
So short of the theatrics of decanting wine, which I must admit can be amusing, I’m not a big fan of decanting.
But having said that, it actually does not hurt the wine and if you enjoy doing it or like entertaining your visitors by the procedure , by all possible means keep on decanting.
Some of my winemaker friends might disagree with my opinion here and that is OK.
I would accept that wines that are very dear and have been made in more standard tactics might gain from decanting, but the typical wines that we buy for Tuesday night dinner probably won’t.
So whether you select decanting wine or not is up to you. But at the very least you now know the reasons behind you choice.
Mark is a pro winemaker, previous winery owner, writer and frequent speaker on wine. He now helps people to learn about wine with his wine classes all though the US.
