You’ve probably heard that letting a wine breathe does magical transformative things. But you might wonder why pouring one thing into another thing before pouring into the final thing matter? Glad you asked! Decanting is a process where you pour the bottle into a glass/crystal container designed to maximize wine-oxygen surface contact. This process also allows you to remove sediment and agitate the wine.
Decanting is the same idea as swirling your wine glass before smelling and tasting it. Wine + oxygen = flavor enhancement. When a wine is first in contact with oxygen it begins to break down (oxidize). Oxidation early on can open up a wine, mellowing out the wine and releasing flavors and aromas that were not present when it was first opened. Over time though, as a wine becomes fully oxidized (say leaving a bottle open overnight), it’s bad. The wine will end up tasting flat and all the joy will be gone from it. If you don’t have a decanter, you can pick up a wine aerator which does some of the work of decanting, but not completely.
But do all wines need decanting? And how long? There are tons of guides you can find online with lots of rules for timing. I mainly just simplify it to a few rules:
- If you are drinking to get drunk, who cares? I don’t decant in this case. When you want to get smashed, ain’t nobody got time for that. If your wine of choice for this task is not that good you could use a wine aerator. Leave the decanter in the cabinet for another day.
- If it’s a white wine, unless you got a truly fancy pants bottle, skip decanting. Just use an aerator if you want some fast oxygenation.
- If it’s a big, complex white wine or light red, decant for up to 30 minutes.
- If it’s a medium red wine decant for 30 minutes to an hour.
- If it’s a heavy red wine and you have time to kill, decant for 1 to 4 hours.
- If it’s a super old red wine (over 20 years old), don’t decant; oxidation will happen fast and break the wine.
These are my own personal rules, and I try to keep things as simple as possible. It’s important to try things out and decide how you like them too. Try decanting a wine and having a pour every 30 minutes to see how it changes over time, it’s a fun experiment. Also try a straight pour from a new bottle, and then a pour through an aerator to see the difference.
In the end it’s all about what you enjoy most, so go out there are find what works for you!