WINING THE KEYS / You Only Need to Dump the Good Ones!
Decanting – it’s simple in concept but something that freaks everyone out. When you’re at a restaurant, when should you ask for your wine to be decanted? It may not be for the reasons you think.
First of all, there are two reasons to decant a wine. The first is to let young wines aerate and the second is to separate old wines from their sediment.
Let’s take a look at the first reason – aeration. What kind of wines do you want to aerate? For the most part, it’s the young: tannic reds – cabernets, nebbiolos, merlots, syrahs and the like — that are tightly wound. Aeration will allow these wines to soften and open up. Now, if you’re lucky enough to be at a restaurant and ordering a nice, expensive young cabernet and the server asks if you’d like the bottle opened now so it can breathe, immediately reach for his collar, pull his head toward yours and gently, yet sternly, slap both cheeks.
Opening a bottle doesn’t aerate anything. That little opening on the neck of the bottle and the full level of liquid in it is done specifically to keep air from getting to the wine. You’d have to open it a full day before drinking, for it to have any effect. After gently, yet sternly, reprimanding your server, tell him/her to go and get a decanter to properly aerate the wine. If he says that they don’t have any decanters, quickly stand up and get the hell out of that restaurant. If they don’t have decanters, they don’t care about their wines and they’re probably going to be pouring it into those damn Libby glasses anyway.
Now if they do have decanters, yes, you do want it decanted as soon as possible. It’s best to have about an hour in the decanter to get the full effect. Also, when the wine is decanted, pour it so that the wine runs down the side of the decanter, not straight down so that it splashes to the bottom.
As I stated before, the second reason to decant is to separate sediment from the juice in old wines. How old is old? The general rule is more than ten years but the true indicator is the amount of sediment in the bottle. What that sediment is is the tannins that have fallen out of the emulsion over the years. These wines generally don’t need to be aerated; age has taken care of softening of the wine. So you don’t want these wines decanted until you’re ready to drink them.
In the best of all possible worlds, you want to have had the bottle standing upright for about two days to get the sediment to gather at the bottom of the bottle. You then want to slowly pour the wine into the decanter right up until the sediment comes to the neck of the bottle. This will leave a little wine in the bottle, but you can go ahead and slurp that down when no one is looking and spit out the crunchy bits (at least, that’s what I do)!
So those are the ins and outs of decanting. But there is one other time when decanting becomes useful – cork breakage. If a cork goes bad in a bottle and breaks when you’re removing it, all is not lost. Gently push in the last bit of cork and grab your decanter and a stainless steel strainer. Do not use a coffee filter; it will destroy the wine. Wine is an emulsion and coffee filters are designed to extract all impurities. However, it’s those impurities that give the wine its flavor, not to mention the fact that coffee filters are full of dirt.
That’s it for this week, so until the next time – wine a bit, you’ll feel better.
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