Wine Breather

I never heard of it. I cannot imagine it is much more effective than pouring the wine into a carafe. Pouring will aerate it and the carafe has a larger surface area so that speeds up aeration. But then if it is a neat gizmo, go for it.

Ray

Never heard of that particular product, and I would agree with Ray about decanting.

However, I will repeat something here that I posted previously - if you have a really young red wine that still needed to age but you want to have right then, you can "speed up aging" by decanting half the bottle, then "shaking the snot" (professional wine-maker term. Really. That's who I got it from) out of the wine for 10-15 seconds. By rapidly speeding oxidation, you can get the flavors you want in about 15 minutes. However, the wine will be dead in about 2 hours, so plan to finish the bottle that night, or cook with it the next day.

I suspect this is what the wine breather is supposed to do something similar, though a little more controlled and slowly. Personally, I'd stick with decanting.

Rob

I also agree, almost. Actually I would uncork the wine many hours before drinking but not decant it. This will allow a very slow oxidation over many hours. This was suggested in another forum and I have been very happy with the processing in my limited, completely uncontrolled tests.

Then let it age. Although decanting or using the aerating product can soften up a tannin wine and allow the wine to open up a bit, IMHO, it is no substitute for properly aging a wine.

Andy

BTW, Welcome back. Weren't you on an extended bicycle trip or something?

Andy

And I agree to let it age properly. I've found it easiest that, if I taste wine, to judge it's youth and make plans to open it when it would appear to have it's best flavor. Sometimes that's that evening, sometimes that's years in the future. However, my point was that there are some free options to the wine breather, depending on what you're trying to do.

Planned to go to the Black Sea down the Danube and return by other means but when I got to Budapest I turned round due to lack of trust in my velo ( new rear wheel, new complete derailleur gears and generally "windy" about similar problems in Romania where it would be more difficult). But I celebrated my 68th birthday near Bratislava. So I cycled back up the Danube to my start point, at its source. I cycled about 3000 kms in all and spent

49 days in my v small 2 man tent ( it is really only a 1 man tent -- have a look at it on my website --- last years trip -- not done this years update yet but same loading and same velo! --- watch this space).

In 51 days travelling I only had 6 unpleasant days of which 4 1/2 were very wet. I wished I could have spent another 7+ weeks doing my thing.

ps. I haven't drunk so much beer in the last 20 years! Took a fancy to the wheat beer -- especially the dark version -- "dunkeln weisbier". But dangerously high alcohol level. My normal lunch time tipple was a "radler" ---literaly "a biker" which was what I would call a shandy -- a mix of beer and lemonade -- but it was still at about 2.5%+ abv.. But it is nice to travel in Europe ( as opposed to the UK) where I can buy a good bottle of standard red/white wine, 12% abv, in a supermarket at less than 2 Euro a bottle to go with my evening "one pot stew"

That's enuff!