Wines, no need to breath ?

Well, talking from experience I'd have to say I don't agree. I've opened wines that immediately smelled "closed" and lacked friut on the nose but which after some time in a decanter had "opened up" and revealed fruit in abundance. This has happened with very many wines and I don't think I'm just dreaming it. Even if you just poor some wine in a glass and leave it for a while the same transformation takes place. That said, many wines probably don't improve with exposure.

Who's Jane McQuity?

Marcello

This unknowledgeable contributor thinks that Ms MacQuity (never heard of her) is just trying her hand at fast easy myth debunking, in order to get the sympathy of her average reader.

True most wines do not benefit from aeration, because most wines are just not worth drinking. On AFW we tend to be interested in those wines that ARE worth drinking, and for this MINORITY (quantitatively speaking) of world wine production I think that MOST good wines benefit from aeration.

Ms MacQuity seems to confuse decanting for aeration and decanting for letting sediment decant (properly speaking).

Good wines are not that fragile, and some wines that seem quite average during the first 4 hours turn out to be superb the next day...

Another myth is that mature wines must not be aerated too long, because THEY are fragile. In my experience, pure bull, some 1920's Bordeaux, red and white, gained enormously with 1 hour or more of air exposure.

Let me add one more thing. In my experience, wines that spoil during aeration are wines that were no better at opening time. If they cannot stand aeration, they were no godd to begin with.

Bye

Mike

Now don't hold anything back, Ian! :^D

I'm with you on this one (decanting for aeration), of course - especially in the case of Italian reds. I don't know why that should be, but a good, young Italian red will invariably need so much air to open that I often underestimate that, and as a result end up drinking only the last glass at its best. As for the why, that'd be good material for another thread on Italian winemaking techniques vs the rest of the world.

Tom S

thanks for summing up my opinion, Ian! Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

As others have already said, the notion that breathing and/or decanting is pointless runs contrary to fact. Ms. McQuity must either not have tried many ageworthy wines or have no palate. What I can contribute to this discussion is a little sense of *why* air may improve a wine's bouquet. Most wines are bottled under what we could term "reductive" conditions (reduction here meaning the opposite of oxidation). Part of what happens as that wine ages (but only part) is the gradual and slow oxidation of various components to give rise to what we think of as "bouquet" and "tertiary aromas." A very powerful red wine might remain in a reductive state in perpetuity. So, when you open one of these wines, exposure to atmospheric oxygen induces chemical reactions with the reductive flavors of the wine that produce more bouquet. FWIW, the same thing happens with coffee: the familiar aroma of fresh-brewed coffee is the result of oxygen-induced reactions that liberate odorants. That's why you should start with cold water that is used just before reaching a boil (more dissolved oxygen in the water). Come to think of it, oxidation also accounts for the familiar smells of onion and garlic...

HTH Mark Lipton

Aeration can't hurt in two basic instances: 1) Young Tannic reds

2) Older reds throwing sediment--I've had 30+ year old nebbiolo based wines, Vallana Spannas, older Barolos/Barbaresco that taste flat upon opening but after they are decanted suddenly go through a few minutes to an hours improvement before(if there's any left) fading away.

I never decant without tasting first!!!

Hi all I own a book by some professors of the Davis University stating on breathing: What chemical reactions could take place on the wine surface to fundamentally improve the wine in one hour or two? In their opinion: none... FWIW, I opened a Beychevelle -97 only yesterday for an evening of slow drinking with wife, sort of celebratively. No decanting, the first glass showed a fruity nose with mainly black cherries in the taste and more than a hint of bitterness. A lean and delicate wine, no cedar or pencil shavings, not very special, really. Near two hours later the wine had changed considerably, however - the bitterness had disappeared, the wine was broader, jammier and more complex, real yummy and very, very pleasant :-) Now, the 64.000USD question is: Was it breathing or heating? Do we drink our wine too cold? Instead of 17-18 degrees, should it be 21? Hypothesis: Ideal serving temperature is 1 degree below ambient temperature? Hmmm, sounds a bit unlikely... Lafite at 45C in the Mojave desert... Anybody got a better idea? :-) Anders

Seems like we have McQuiity (and at least one other expert - Peynaud)

- not to be ignored lightly - ranged up against a mass of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. But, surely someone must have done, blind tests on this.....?

The scientist in me is reluctant to accept evidence from people (even myself!) when those people might be lead to expect one result or another from decanting or allowing to breathe. There may even be order effects - the 2nd tasting is better irrespective of whether it has had longer to breathe.

She is right as far as exposure to oxygen is not good for wine. However, I wonder if she has any taste buds.

Dimitri

I'm glad someone else brought this up. I'm convinced that the effect of subsequent tastes of a given wine - particularly red wines (due to the tannin) - is to partially and differentially saturate the palate in such a way that each successive taste will be different from the previous.

This is not to say that the wine itself doesn't change with exposure to air; merely that there are simultaneous effects occurring that might be impossible to separate.

Of course, I wouldn't expect this effect to be too noticeable in the nose of the wine, as the recovery time for the olfactory sense is much shorter than the palate. Still, there is such a thing as olfactory fatigue, as anyone who has ever shopped for perfume knows well.

Tom S

I haven't done a true blind test, though we did do an experiment a couple years ago where we opened one bottle and double-decanted, and then 2 hours later poured side by side same wine from freshly opened bottle- noticable difference.

Shouldn't be tht hard if you can get a group together. Take 4 pairs of bottles. Decant one of each. 2 hours later pour into their respective bottles, open other bottles of each pair. Serve in flights to guests. Have then vote on preference for A, B , or no difference.

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

I have done this very experiment -- repeatedly. Often when I open a youngish red that I suspect may need airing, I'll pour off a portion into a decanter but leave behind the majority. Then, I pour both wines into glasses and serve, asking my victims which they prefer. I do admit that this is a single blind study, but the results are revealing: when asked, most people can discern a difference, though which they prefer depends on a host of variables that I can't control. Nonetheless, that there's a difference between the two -- and that many prefer the aerated wine -- is beyond question IMO.

Mark Lipton

But, Tom, what about when you're simply smelling the wine before and after aeration? I can attest to profound differences occuring in the nose alone.

As I stated to Dale, just decant part of a bottle and served both decanted and undecanted wine side by side for comparative tasting. If our tastebuds saturated that rapidly and easily, comparative tasting of a flight of wines would be a far less useful method than it is.

But olfactory fatigue would hardly explain the numerous instances of people noticing a wine's bouquet *increasing* as it sat in the glass.

Mark Lipton

Dear Ian,

I' not trolling you, honestly. Nor do I think I have quoted MacQuity out of context, here is some more of the article..........

"To decant, or not to decant, that should no longer be the question, but it returns regularly from the dark ages of wine to haunt modern drinkers. Somehow, the old wine school's erroneous and risible belief that wine is alive and needs to 'breath' before it is ready to drink lingers"

The whole article is a dismissal of the practices of decanting and breathing.

Yorkshiresoul.

______________

And in fairness this is not the first post by this northern lad, none of which have resembled trolling AFAIK.

-E

Salut/Hi YorkshireSoul,

le/on Wed, 28 Jan 2004 07:38:08 +0000 (UTC), tu disais/you said:-

Thanks for replying so positively! You must admit though, that at first view, it looked as if it might be!

Risible or not, wine _does_ change when decanted, and/or in glass. The purpose of decanting (IMO) is mainly to avoid the need of leavng each fill of the glass in place a long time before drinking.

Well, she's wrong. Plain wrong. And I'm buggered if I can see why she has done this.