You may have heard about pulling the cork on a bottle of wine and “letting it breathe.” Those that follow this practice may give the un-corked bottle thirty minutes to an hour before declaring that “the wine is now ready to drink!”
While pulling the cork does allow air to enter the bottle, it is only filling the top-most part of the neck of the bottle with air and exposing the wine’s surface area equivalent to the size of a dime to the air.
Pulling the cork and leaving the opened bottle exposed to air will affect the wine over a long period of time (days to weeks). But, to really allow a bottle of wine to “breathe” before serving, the wine needs even greater exposure to air.
Exposing a wine to air, even briefly, while pouring it into a glass can help. But, wines will typically need more.
Why is this? Well, although wine is produced just from the juice of grapes and yeast, the chemistry that goes on during the fermentation process can yield a few undesirable bi-products. One of these bi-products is hydrogen sulfide that can smell of rotten eggs when sampling the wine’s aroma.
So, when you transfer wine from its bottle to another vessel (e.g., a decanter), the first process that kicks-in is evaporation. Not evaporation of the wine, per se, but evaporation of highly volatile components that are in the wine from the natural winemaking process. The second process that begins is oxidation. This short-term exposure of a wine to oxygen can be beneficial. Oxidation and evaporation both help to smooth out a wine’s rough edges and make them taste more balanced and expressive.
Thirty minutes to an hour in a decanter can help release these volatile compounds. But, you probably don’t want to exceed two to three hours of decanting in order to keep your wine’s flavors from actually becoming deadened.
In order to find the peak flavor of the wine after you have opened a bottle, you need to taste it immediately after you open it to establish a baseline. This understanding of where the wine started will help you determine when the evaporation and oxidation processes have peaked the wine’s flavors — it’ll just taste better and have a smoother mouth-feel.
Highly tannic and full-bodied wines benefit most from this – wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet blends, Syrah, and Syrah blends.
While this discussion is meant mostly for red wines and maybe a few aged white wines, most everyday young white wines do not need any exposure to air before consuming.
Do you need a fancy, expensive decanter to get all these benefits? No. So, next time we’ll look at different types of decanters and ways to best decant a wine. Cheers!