Wines, no need to breath ?

I presume you meant to say "most prefer the aerated wine"...? Just wish I knew now what evidence MacQuitty could offer :-)

url for Jane MacQuity's article..............

--

I've had *way* too many examples of where a little air did a wine a lot of good to think that breathing is a uniformly bad idea.

However, I've seen people open a wine to breathe, not decant, and very little change takes place through the small neck of the wine bottle. I've also seen people decant and let something breathe for hours, and miss the peak of the wine. Unless one is quite experienced with a specific wine, I do not believe one should let a wine breathe without supervising it.

Dana

Salut/Hi Dana Myers,

le/on Thu, 29 Jan 2004 21:25:44 -0800, tu disais/you said:-

Agreed 100%. Opening a bottle without decanting is useless.

Yup, that happened once to me. I wanted to do a comparative tasting of top Rioja Gran Rerservas, and - following Hugh Johnson's advice at the time, decanted 12 hours in advance. By the time we came to drink them, they were ALL OTT.

I wasn't best pleased.

We'll have to agree to disagree. While I'll agree that opening a bottle alone doesn't do ANYTHING, I often don't decant. If I'm opening a young classed-growth Bordeaux, of course I decant. But I find that with a wine that doesn't cry out for decanting, I often pour out one glass (enough to get to low shoulder or below). I find there's enough surface area at that point for noticable aeration effects over an hour or two.

This is also a good option for those wine dinners where I'm opening a half-dozen bottles (I only own 2 decanters, plus a carafe that can BARELY hold

best,

Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

That's a great excuse but are you still in good shape 6 glasses ahead of your guests (g)?

Jim.

LOL.

Hey, I use the 3 decanters, so I'm only 3 glasses ahead of my guests (and I share with Bets) :) Dale

Dale Williams Drop "damnspam" to reply

Salut/Hi Dale Williams,

le/on 30 Jan 2004 16:02:29 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

Hmm, I'd not thought of that. OK, as a compromise it's OK, though probably it would have been better simply to decant into another bottle. There's no law that says that a wine should be served from the bottle it was aged in. I suspect that the decantation process itself aerates enough for the small subsequent surface area to be unimportant.

Chuckle! As long ias it's non-tainting, who cares? Actually I've only got two claret jugs, one magnum jug and one tokay decanter (.5 litre Bohemian cut crystal). Since we've lived here, that's not been a constraint. In the UK, when we sometimes used to taste 4-5 reds in parallel, I'd get one or more friends to bring a decanter.

I go fairly regularly to fixed price wine dinners. Whenever I see that a wine is not being served from the bottle, but has been decanted ostensibly to let it breathe, it usually is a sign of a young, aggressive and acidic wine which needed the air exposure to soften its bite. Also, it may be a sign that the wine has a funky smell, which dissipates as the wine "breathes"; the wine is not exposed to air to breathe, but to resuscitate.

Say, if decant>Jane MacQuity writing in last weekends Times claimed that almost without

-- ================================================Do you like wine? Do you live in South Florida? Visit the MIAMI WINE TASTERS group at

Well, if air is what you want, why not put the wine in a blender and crank up the RPMs?

-- ================================================Do you like wine? Do you live in South Florida? Visit the MIAMI WINE TASTERS group at

I have done that - it didn't work as well as just letting the wine breathe. Fun though.

Boy, I personally notice a definite difference, but only among certain tannic reds as would be expected... Cabernet Sauvignon, Shriaz, Zinfidels, etc., that are very tannic are way to bitter right out of the bottle. I decant them at least 45 minutes, sometimes a couple of hours for ones I know to be really strong. It pays off and makes an appreciable improvement in the wine.

Cabernets, especially- and this may just be my palatte- seem to enjoy the greatest benifit from decanting, and is one of my favorites wines... but without decanting, I don't enjoy it as much and if I serve it to guests, I get "that look" after their first drink.

Clint

Salut/Hi Leo Bueno,

le/on Sat, 31 Jan 2004 13:58:06 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

I do, and for many whites as well.

Absolutely not.

Quite so, as the Brits say. ;^)

I have to admit, Ian, that I've also _drunk_ wine from some pretty unconventional containers. Aside from the occasional plastic cup, there was the one bottle of 1970 BV Cabernet (not GdL) consumed at the shore of a lake above Tuolumne Meadows (Yosemite area) at ~10,000 feet from a Sierra cup. I'd lugged that bottle uphill for 6 or 7 miles, rolled in my sleeping bag, and opened it a week later when my friends and I were about to depart. It was magnificent!

Tom S

Salut/Hi Tom S,

le/on Sat, 31 Jan 2004 19:24:48 GMT, tu disais/you said:-

I can't pretend I've never done so, though it's not done too much for the wine.

Reminds me of the Christmas day lunch one year when Jacquie & I were skiing at Tignes. The SCGB announced a party so off we went to meet them in the middle of the Tignes Glacier (don't ask me the height, but Tignes is at

Anyway, the menu was smoked salmon sandwiches, washed down by the red wine someone had brought. It was SO cold up there, that we seived out the ice chunks between our teeth before drinking what was left. That was pretty wonderful too, fortunately we couldn't taste much! Did a great run down the red afterwards - the only trouble was that I was supposed to be taking the beginners down the blue. Ahem.

Aha, this proves what I knew all along about wine folk; we are all a bunch of lunatics!

-- ================================================Do you like wine? Do you live in South Florida? Visit the MIAMI WINE TASTERS group at

Um. Are you being facetious? This is clearly the "if a little is good, a lot is always better" approach which is demonstrably irrational.

A little, controlled, amount of air is usually good for a red wine. A lot will kill it.

Dana

Old wines almost always have some funk, and just a few minutes of swirling will fix it. That's the way older wines are.

A few years back, we did a couple of dinners where people brought their oldest, moldiest (literally) wines and we opened them. The sharpest example was a '78 Mouton Rothschild; it was decidely funky directly after opening, and most of the guests, young-wine drinkers, all declared it "bad". I may not be the sharpest tool in the wine-drinker shed, but I thought "it's been in that bottle for 20 years, give it chance to un-cramp a little".

About 5 minutes of gently swirling cleared the funk and a superb nose of violets and cedar and a lot of fruit emerged. The guests that had wandered off in boredom were shocked to find that the "bad" wine had turned into one of the "best" they'ed ever had. 5 minutes of air cleared out the funk.

It's not resuscitation, it's just the way older wines work. We had several other examples of this at those dinners. The '74 Chateau Montelena Cab was superb, and the '77 Franciscan Cab knocked me over. Simply delicious.

Dana

We tried a bottle of Duhart Milon Rothschild 88 last night. This definitely evolved over the course of the meal and preparation (two of us tried a glass before dinner). We didn't decant, but kept pouring out of the bottle. It revealed much more plum like fruits the last glass I had than the one served before dinner. (One ends up with a little soot in the last couple of glasses, using this method, but this wine had not laid a heavy sediment.)

For the record... when opened... cedar, lead pencil, with smoky flavors and coffee like finish. Later revealed a little mint. With time, opened up with plum like fruits. Seems to show drier fruits than 89 or 90 Medocs, but I have not drunk a lot of the 88s.

Tom Schellberg