Letting a Red Wine Breathe

Letting a wine breathe means that you deliberately expose the wine to the air, to help start the exchange of wine molecules with air molecules. This both has an effect on the wine's flavor as well as making the wine easier to smell.

Decanting is all about removing sediment from a wine, and allowing the wine to breathe. These are things that older, red wines do - young wines and white wines do not usually have to be decanted.

Remember that your tongue can only taste four types of tastes - all of the other sensations you get from wine come from your nose. You want that wine to be giving off aromas! If it's not releasing flavors into the air, it's going to taste like strange water.

Just taking a cork out of a bottle does very little. The tiny amount of surface area touching the air in the bottle neck will cause no real change in the wine over even a few hours. If you're going to actually create a positive effect on the wine, you have to create a large surface area for the wine and air to react across.

This is where decanting comes into play. Decanters are deliberately designed to expose large amounts of the wine to the air, to help the wine and air work with each other. This helps the older red wines "wake up" and start to have a full aroma again, after years of being cooped up in the bottle.

All About Decanting
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