Wine breathing how long

The same with wine. You need to Let Your Wine Breathe. Letting Wine Breathe How to let a wine breathe depends on the age of the wine and how long it has been in the bottle. A younger wine, say less than 3 years old does not need much if any time.

A wine 10 or more years old will benefit from an hour of air time. How the wine gets air can also differ. Older wine is like your dear old grandmother. She should be awakened in the morning gently, slowly, over a longer period of time. A younger wine is like your teenage son. He needs to be shaken to get him started in the morning. Therefore, with an older wine, it is best to use a decanter and pouring the wine gently into it.

When letting the wine breathe , you can open a bottle and just let it sit for an hour. If you want to shorten that time, then you can pour it into a decanter to expose the wine to more air and surface. All wines benefit from letting them breathe. Opposed to general thinking, every wine benefits from air time if it is made well and the length of time depends on how old the wine is. Remember the Ginny in the bottle?

It took time for her to work the get loosened up. A long time ago I dated a guy who had the mortifying habit, when dining at expensive restaurants, of placing one palm over a glass of freshly opened red and shaking it like he was auditioning for the Tom Cruise part in Cocktail.

Then he would wipe his dripping hand on his table napkin, take a sip and exclaim over how well the wine had ''opened up''. It was an emergency CPR method of getting wine to breathe that required no advance planning. Even though it worked and I ended up marrying him , I think asking to have the wine decanted might have been a mite less embarrassing. If you're at home, you can open the wine an hour or three before you plan to drink it but don't expect it to do much to aerate the wine.

The surface exposed to air is so small that it's unlikely to make a lot of difference. Pouring the wine into another vessel - from a height, if you have good aim and like drama - is much more effective. Be careful with older vintages, which can be much more sensitive once opened and may lose fruit aromas much more quickly. Perhaps the best thing to do is conduct your own research, which may necessarily involve opening a bottle or two.

Have fun experimenting! This article was originally published on Decanter. Home Learn Advice. Credit: Decanter.

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