It’s sad really. The social media phenomena has opened up incredible things for anyone with internet access but as Einstein pointed outmore or less, anything that has the potential to do great things for society has the equal potential to cause great harm. Thus social networking in the wine world has it’s positive sides but what happens when several misinformed people pass on bad information to those that don’t know any better? Predictably, those that don’t know better think that what they’ve learned or been told is accurate and it spreads like wildfire. Pretty soon it becomes a de facto practice and at that point no one even questions it anymore.

Such is the case of decanting wine, which is the practice of pouring wine from the bottle into a crystal or glass container. A decanter was designed to aerate the wine but its higher use is to simply separate the wine from sediment in the bottle, which is usually only necessary for older wines (please visit here for more on decanting older wine: http://www.classof1855.com/Storing___Drinking_Wine.html). Having visited sites like CellarTracker and Snooth where wannabe-wine-critic members rate wine and leave tasting notes I’ve found that decanter abuse is highly prevalent and unfortunate. Good thing there’s no wine police or there’d be big trouble, yes?

Some cardinal rules about decanters:

1. decanting bad wine will not improve it – it will still be bad wine 

2. if a wine needs to be decanted for any length of time, it is not ready to drink

3. some wine will never be ready to drink because it was poorly made to begin with – buy better wine and stop expecting miracles from an $8 bottle

4. decanting changes the balance of everything – alcohol, tannins, fruit, and acidity, but the outcome is all guesswork. Never expose a good or fine wine to air for long periods of time. As for bad wine, just don’t buy it to begin with because nothing you do is going to improve it

5. it is impossible to know exactly when a wine will ‘peak’ (reach its optimal flavor and aromatics) while sitting in a decanter – it’s much better to have it peak in your glass as opposed to missing it entirely while it is being 'decanted'

6. most people that abuse decanters do so because they are attempting to soften the wine’s harsh or dominant tannins – if a wine is not balanced going in to the bottle, it will not be balanced coming out of the bottle and decanting it just arbitrarily shifts around various components of the wine. Thus if oxygen softens tannins (and it does ultimately), it means that other components have also been affected by oxygen and usually in a detrimental way. For example, the first thing that happens when wine hits the air is that alcohol evaporates; the amount of evaporation is wine temperature dependent amongst other things. And this is not always a bad thing but changing the chemistry of any given wine is like playing the table in Vegas. Usually the house wins.

7. some people like to use decanters to serve wine, which is perfectly acceptable if the intent is to get it into glasses within a short amount of time

Aerating wine is not all bad and in fact is a necessary technique to use while coaxing the wine to open up (release its aromas and flavors) but it almost always should be done in your glass by swirling. I have read with horror, accounts of forty-year-old First Growth Bordeaux being decanted for four hours. Other people have written about wines they have decanted for four days! This is utter nonsense and while I agree that people are, and should be, free to do what they want with their wine, I believe this abuse of a decanter is most often out of not knowing any better.

Wine needs minute amounts of oxygen to age in the bottle (and to age in barrels too – another subject), which is how better wines mature. Oxygen molecules do not penetrate the cork but rather move up the neck of the bottle in the microscopic gaps between the cork and the glass. But oxygen in any other form but tiny, almost immeasurable amounts is very detrimental to wine and will oxidize it quickly if left exposed to air. Taking a forty-year-old wine that is already fragile and mature, possibly past its peak from bottle age, exposing it to air for four hours, and then complaining about the quality is just plain egregious.

Do yourself a favor and do not decant your wine unless it is older and needs to be separated from its sediment. Tell your wine friends about this too because no one benefits from abusing decanters. Most of all buy better wine or buy wine that is ready to drink when you want it to be - otherwise you are really wasting your time and money.

David Boyer

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