Help please on when to open and when to decant

Mature wine needs no oxidation. Some immature wines may benefit from it. I open wine just a short time before serving it, no matter what anyone else thinks. I drink Italian wines exclusively.

My experience tells me that Italian wines, moreso than any others, need a good deal of air before they "come together". This is especially true of _young_ Italian reds. Sometimes I'm down to the last glass in the bottle and find that the wine is just starting to strut its stuff.

Tom S

This is a controversial question and you will get different answers from different people. Generally young wines need more breathing than older wines, but this is not always the case. Italian wines, contrary to the comments of one poster, do need a lot of breathing - depending on the wine, several hours is not inappropriate. If memory serves me well, there is no book that has been published on the subject; there have been a number of papers and doctoral dissertations, but again the results are largely inconclusive. Prior knowlege of the wine you are about to drink is the best teacher.

Ron Lel

Letting any wine sit open for several hours will ruin it.

Some high-alcohol wines benefit from long decanting.

Dan-O

Salut/Hi Rick,

le/on 3 Jan 2005 14:41:27 -0800, tu disais/you said:-

Thanks.

I've read many, many books on wine, though I can't pretend to have read them all, and I've never seen anything very authoritative on the subject. Some authors (Hugh Johnson, for example, says that infinitely more wines fail to show well because they aren't aired sufficiently, than because they are aired too much) go so far as to say that most wine should be decanted either to remove them from sediment, or to aerate them. Others don't mention the subject at all, while some are a lot more cautious on the subject.

One contributor to this newsgroup is so vehemently against decanting under any circumstances (look in Google under the name Scarpitti) that I killfiled him - as did quite a number of others here.

different types and maturities?

Experience and experimentation are the best guides. I tend to agree with Hugh J that most wines benefit more than one might expect from decanting. But it is also a matter of personal taste and you alone can judge what _you_ like.

As a HUGE generalisation, the bigger the wine, the more it will benefit from air - remember that opening a bottle without decanting it is almost entirely useless. The younger the wine, the longer it needs. But youth is not measured in years, but in it's own development. For red wines, purple is a sign of a young wine, brickiness the sign of a more mature one.

The best way to find out, though, is when you plan to open a wine, ask here a week beforehand (some of us don't write here every day). give the name of the wine, its vintage and the name of the grower. Probably someone here will give you a good steer. You can then experiment by planning to open the wine less long in advance and tasting over quite a long period. You'll soon see whether decanting the wine has made a difference that you like, and whether you agree with the advice you were given. Also remember that although wine takes air in the glass, it tends to do so slightly differently from doing so in the decanter.

Hope that help a bit.

It's a troll

Dont feed it

Let's start the year by remembering this.

Have a great troll-free 2005

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

That's too bad. Italians wines are wonderful, but one of the things I enjoy most about wine is being able to taste wines from many different areas and how terroir influences wines of the same varietal.

Sean

And definitely trollish. PLease, do not feed this troll!

M.

Rick,

As many have pointed out, there does not seem to be a hard_n_fast set of rules for the time allowed for decanting for aeriation (not sediment removal, which can coincide). One thing I like to do is decant the bottle, then pour a glass, or two rather quickly. I'll play with my glass as guests talk, do other things, etc. and reflect on the changes in that glass. While it is more open to the air, than the decanted wine in a "ship's decanter," when I find it getting about "right" I'll pour the guests' wine. Some like to follow the wine's evolution, so they get to join in. It is this evolution, that I find most interesting, and sometimes get so lost in the changes, that my wife has to remind me to "join in the meal, conversation, whatever, and to PLEASE pour her some wine... "

It was actually this "evolution" process that hooked me on wine many years ago.

Hunt