The Very Useful Wine Decanter
Sunday, June 24, 2012 at 03:24PM 
In this age of fast food, fast cars, mass transit, instant communication and instant gratification, the very idea of slowing down to decant a bottle of wine seems somehow an artifact of a bygone era. An anachronism. We want our wine and we want it now. Straight out of the bottle and into the glass, just like we like our beer. The wine decanter does harken back to an earlier, gentler time. It releases the soul of wine. The soul of an unhurried process that began with the sun shining down on grapes slowly ripening on the vine, to the picking at the right time, to the fermentation, and onto the final bottling and aging.
It is the very nature of wine, fine wine that is, to be savored, to be coaxed to reveal its true nature. To be allowed to open up and tell us its story. Like a fine work of art, a fine piece of music or dare I say, a fine aged cheddar, a fine wine needs to sit, to sing, to play and to blossom. Wine is by nature a wild thing transformed by a certain alchemy, and the bottle is not only a literal object, but a metaphor as well. Wild things need to escape being bottled up to fly free.
Now back in the day wine bottles contained sediments (and some fine aged wines today do as well). The wine needed to be poured into a vessel and the sediment left at the bottom of the bottle. The purpose of a decanter in those times was to produce a pure drink that didn't have, well, dirt in it. So to speak.
But a decanter has another purpose as well. A nobler one. When a bottle of wine is put to cellar, it ages. The ageing softens the tannins and matures the wine. More complex combinations of molecules are produced giving the wine a deeper personality, a nobility. This process is accomplished by oxygen. Air is one of the alchemical elements that produces the transformation-to quote Voltaire or somebody like him. This process happens very slowly in a bottle. However, when a wine is released from the bottle, the aeration process speeds up. It is why people swirl a wine around in a glass, it exposes it to air.
In a relatively young wine, decanting matures it. It accelerates the aging process so that in a sense, 2 hours of decanting might equal 2 years or more of cellar aging. I have actually heard stories of wine being decanted for 2 days! Now the idea is, again, that air-oxygen-immediately begins the start of oxidising, the process that breaks down the harsh tannins, softens the wine, and releases the bouquet, the flavor and the color.
Young red wines as well as venerable whites benefit from decanting. However, a delicate red like a Pinot Noir, if decanted, should only be done for a short while because the diffusion tends to soften them too much and might weaken them. Swirling the glass is sufficient. However, a Napa Cabernet, French Bordereaux or Burgundy, or an Italian Barolo, or a Pouilly-Fuissé truely benefit from this, open up and tell their story and blossom like a beautiful rose. There's a lot of torqued up energy in a powerful bottle of fine wine. Release it and let it speak to you!
As for decanters, I have found that the ones with wide, flared bottom, expose the wine to the most air, however, any vessel that allows aeration, even a large pitcher, will work. Some decanters are made of crystal or fine glass and make the wine sparkle and shine-another reason to decant. Now there is a man, a Nathan Myhrvold, an x chief of technology at Microsoft, who claims that putting a wine, ANY WINE, into a blender, " hyperdecants" it, and actually kills normal decanting etc. He swears by it. However, the very idea of putting a 93 Chateauneuf du Pape into a blender on 'high', gives me the willies. To each his own. However the idea is the same. Exposing wine to air, opens it up, lets it tell its story, where it came from, what magic it can conjure up, and allows it to transport you into a world of vines, sunlight and good earth, a world of beauty.
Reader Comments (1)
Toast is a bit long for me, I lose interest. But I have a quiestion, why isn't the toaster a little taller? I noticed the bread sticks out the top and it doesn't turn into toast very well. I usually toast about halfway through and then turn the bread top down to finish.
Oh, and a tad more volume, I may be hard of hearing.
Cool stuff.
G : (