The Decanter – dead as a dodo?
THERE is still surprisingly little debate about serving temperatures for wine; most drinkers continue to follow the accepted wisdom unquestionably. The Great Decanting Debate, however, still goes on and those following these articles could well add useful observations to it.
The decanting tradition grew up from a time when wine was drawn off into a jug from a cask in the cellar, and later when winemakers left a deposit in the bottle. Then it made sense to pour wine off this deposit into a decanter so that one could drink without chewing. Nowadays, it still makes sense to decant those few wines that have thrown a heavy deposit, provided they are robust enough to withstand it. Some very old wines and some very lightly perfumed wines would simply loose their bouquet if they had to suffer the fairly boisterous treatment of being poured twice. This is akin to the dangers already described of trying to serve a wine in the great outdoors. Wine and too much air do not make a very good mixture.
The debate centers on the question of how good a mixture wine and some air is. For a long time it has been thought that the process of ageing in wine was simply one of slow oxidation, that small amounts of air either already present in the sealed bottled or entering through the cork gradually react with the wine to make it develop into something more complex and ramified. It was thought therefore that if you poured a bottle of wine into another container such as a decanter, you would aerate it and somehow telescope the ageing process into a few minutes by putting the wine into contact with a lot of air. The bouquet would be fanned into life by all this oxygen.
This view is still widely held, but the results of comparative tastings of samples of the same wines, opened and decanted at varying intervals before tasting, have been suspiciously inconclusive. Furthermore, some authorities argue that the effects of aeration can only be harmful; that by exposing a delicate bouquet to air you may make it evanesce, and that the interesting reactions between oxygen and wine are too complicated to be speeded up. All that can happen, they argue, is that the wine starts to oxidize too fast, and therefore deteriorates.
Many ordinary wine drinkers claim that some wines, especially cheap reds, taste much better if opened and not decanted but simply left to “breathe” for a few hours. This may have nothing to do with aeration. After all, such a small proportion of wine – the area of the narrow bottleneck – is in contact with air that only a tiny fraction of the wine in the bottle could possibly react with oxygen. A much more likely explanation is that with very cheap wines there may be off-odours trapped in the gap between the surface of the wine and cork (although this happens less and less in our technically perfect age), and that this ‘breathing’ process allows them to evaporate.
It is true that the potential disadvantage of dissipating the bouquet of a wine by decanting it or allowing a half-full bottle to stand open for a while can sometimes be an advantage. Some wines, full-bodied reds particularly, can be too intensely flavoured when young. Rather than gaining extra flavours, the decanter allows them to lose some of their aggressive youth and mellow into a more palatable, if more vapid middle age. This is especially true of some rich reds from California, Australia, Italy, the Lebanon, and the odd ‘farmyard’ wine from Spain and the Rhône.
Deciding to decant
A good set of rules is to decant a vigorous wine that is not more than 20 years when there is sediment to remove, or a beautiful decanter to enjoy aesthetically, and otherwise not to get too exercised about the whole business. When I’m entertaining, I tend to decant wines with a sediment just before guests arrive for entirely practical reasons – although if the wine is very old and delicate, say more than 20 years old, I would decant only just before serving. If, once the wine has been poured, it is obvious that it is a bit ‘tight’ and would benefit from aeration, simply swirl it around in the glass, which will be even more effective than the decanting process.
Wine leftovers
If a wine is left in a half-empty bottle, the air will accelerate its deterioration. The lighter the wine the faster it will deteriorate. (Though as outlined earlier, some very aggressively full-bodied wines can benefit from a bit of aeration.)
Leftover wines, fractions of a bottle that you will want to keep for future drinking – do not despair – can last for weeks provided it is kept in conditions as cool and as airtight as possible. The warmer it is, and the more air it is left in contact with, the sooner it will spoil.
The answer then is to keep a stock of small bottles, preferably of varied capacities, into which you can decant leftovers. Half-bottles are useful for this purpose, as are the quarter bottles served on planes and the half-litre bottles increasingly used for sweet wines. Fill them right up to the top and then stopper them firmly. Of course the decanting process itself will mean that the wine loses a little bit of its initial freshness, but it should still be enjoyable.
