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I tested three identical bottles of a young Bordeaux wine – one opened 24 hours ago, one opened 2 hours ago and decanted, and freshly opened just before filming. Does aeration really soften tannins and improve the wine? Let’s find out!
**WINE I TASTED/FEATURED IN THIS VIDEO:
🍷2021 Chateau Haut-Bages Liberal, Pauillac, France
https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/haut+bages+liberal+pauillac+medoc+bordeaux+france/2021/
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**CONTENTS OF THIS VIDEO:
0:00 Does Letting Wine Breathe Actually Work?
4:06 The Decanting / Aeration Test
#winetasting #wineeducation #wine
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37 Comments
Hi Agnese, I conduct free wine tastings for the public at a local wine specialty shop. Most of the wines are in the $14 to $40 range. Customers receive about 15ml of each wine in a small tasting glass to give them an idea of what the wine is like. I find that an initial impression of hard tannin is offputting for most customers, so I always aerate the reds into a decanter and then pour it back into the bottle to give the wine some oxygen to set it up. Customers have neither enough wine nor time to see how the wine will develop in the glass. All my customers are aware that I do this and all seem appreciative. No one has yet to complain. Although I aerate young wines at home, I am going to stop based on your video as I always appreciate your expertise and honesty. Who knows, maybe my aerator at home will start collecting dust!
Excellent topic Agnese and a very controversial one! I personally never decant. I like the wine to develop in the glass like you. I love perceiving the changes in aromas come out, and decanting it takes that away. Leaving some of the wine until the next day in the bottle is an excellent way of appreciating how it evolves further.
Very nice video. Enjoyed it.
I wasn’t surprised by the result because I’ve experienced the same thing many times! With young Bordeaux, I feel that they tend to follow a non-linear path when they are poured. They will be really open and expressive at first, and then quickly shut down and harden after an hour or so, only to open back up again several hours later if not the next day.
However, with Bordeaux that has 10-15+ years of age, I feel that they really do open up in a linear way. As in, they just keep getting more and more open and expressive as the night goes on.
Agnese I love your channel and have huge respect for you but I must disagree. I think the 2021 vintage which is approachable and widely seen as for early drinking may not be the best test case. I’m currently drinking a 2012 Gruaud Larose that I opened yesterday and it was very green and light for the first few hours. I vacuum sealed the rest for 24 hours. It gained weight and added some dark fruit flavors that simply weren’t showing after hours in the glass. It really depends. My first classified growth Bordeaux, a 2012 Chateau Batailley was ok when I opened it but I read on cellar tracker that it’s much better the 2nd day. So I vacuum sealed half the bottle and it improved dramatically. The first few hours in the glass was fairly thin. Day 2 was richer with dark fruit and dark chocolate notes. Evolution in the glass over a few hours without 24 hours of time would not have delivered those improvements.
30 years drinking reds. From my personal experience and personal taste I believe that 95% of the time I decant a wine it does taste better. The younger the wine the more decant. Very old wines I do not decant at all ( 25+ years). There is a specific wine that I love when is decanted and hate it if I dont do it and it is Chateau Musar from Lebanon. Also I love to decant a lot Italian wines. Maybe fruit bombs from California are the ones that I could drink with or without a decant.
Great content. Question, please: if tariffs are imposed on Bordeaux 2023 futures, do customers pay the entire tariff amount or do retailers allow their customers to cancel, or are the tariffs absorbed at all by the seller? I am concerned because a 100 dollar bottle I purchase of 2023, if tariffed at 25%, would be 125. This doesn't seem right, because I would want to know how much the seller actually paid for the bottle in order to know how much the end cost should actually reasonably be, including any % the seller might be willing to absorb from their own profit in order to help out their clients. Thanks.
Haha the beginning of the video cracked me up
3:57 : very true and I totally agree
" Wine actually spends time in the glass so we can converse with it". OMG thank you for saying this…lol I thought I was the only one conversing with the wine in my glass 😉 I feel normal again 🍷Love it !!! Thank you 🙏
Great video, I might do something similar with friends who are wine geeks. For me decanting is personal, it really depends on the wine and I usually decant after pouring a wine in the glass and feeling there might be something amiss.
Nice , but anecdotal evidence is misleading sometimes , agree with your preference, but remember you are drinking bottles that aren’t actually equal. I have never understand the 24 hours benefit.
There is a confirmation bias because you already know what to look for in this "blind" tasting. A true test would be if you were given these three wines blind without knowing what's different.
Exactly what you said: if you let all your wines breathe by default, how can you know after which amount of time you like it best? I love my wine talking to me. 🙂👍🏻
That said: just yesterday I finished a bottle of Don Maximiano from 2015 (Coravin for the first 3 glasses, pulled the cork for the last one) and before dismissing the bottle, I took a deep sniff. The cork had been removed 2-3 hours before and boy how lovely the smell was! I could not stop! So here’s the plan for the next bottle: resist the urge to drink it freshly poured and wait a couple of hours. Will be tough, because I definitely like the aromas that are only present in the first 5-10 minutes, but excited to see what happens.
Fascinating results!
I believe that I do a combination of pouring into glass and slow bottle aeration.
Before serving, I move from my wine fridge to regular refrigerator, then take out ~30 minutes prior to a meal.
Then, I open the bottle and pour wine into glass ~15 minutes before the meal. Then, recork.
Usually, we put back into the refrigerator, where it will slowly decant in the cold temperatures with the increasing air introduced with each meal.
The progression becomes noticeable when the bottle reaches closer to the bottom (sometimes over the period of weeks, sometimes a few months!), with the last glass being the most flavorful and expressive regardless of being a red (though most noticeable due to tannins), wine, or pink wine!
The progression is fun, and we are basically Coravin-ing without the Coravin. 😎😄
I’m not going to argue with your preferences. That’s your experience and opinion and it’s a valid as anyone’s. I will say that, I’ve never decanted a young wine in hopes of softening tannins- it never made sense to me, for reasons of not polymerising, as you mentioned. I’ve always decanted young wines with the hopes that some agitation and aeration will bring the aromas a bit more into balance. And my practice is usually a decant, a few swirls in the vessel, and then a pour back into the bottle for 2 to 24 or so hours, depending. My experience has been that this definitely helps but at a rate of about 75% of the time. Of course whether I choose to completely let a wine develop in glass, or decant it, will greatly depend on the circumstances surrounding it’s consumption
I have a completely different experience, I drink almost exclusively Bordeaux and almost always oxygen helps to make the wine more harmonious.
I always taste the wine before it goes into the carafe, but I don't drink Bordeaux as young as in this video, these extremely young Bordeaux wines have a lot of primary fruit straight from the bottle.
Usually after about 6, 7 or 8 years the wine can become a bit more closed.
I usually leave Bordeaux wines between 6 and 12 years old in the carafe for 5 to 6 hours and usually even the last glass is still the best.
Thank you for the experiment and great video! I've always been skeptical about whether there's actually solid, well-designed scientific evidence or meta-analyses to support this concept of "letting wine breathe" to open up its and soften harsh tannins/acidity. I tend to believe such claims are placebo effects based on pseudo-science. My conclusion after watching is.. don’t bother with aeration, especially in a decanter. Thank you!
Been watching your videos for a bit. It's pronounced AIR-ration, not EYE-ration.
The problem with this statement is that it is an absolute and nothing in wine is absolute. Some wines really do benefit from decanting, and some do not. Just because you decant, that does not mean the wine won’t continue to develop in the glass. Some wines may positively develop for 12 – 48 hours.
The context in which you are drinking a wine may also contribute to your decision on decanting. If you are splitting a bottle at home with your partner over a long evening, yeah you probably don’t need to decant. If you are going to a wine dinner and there are 6 – 8 heads on a bottle and you will get less than a glass… might be worth decanting.
IMO a wine that really does benefit from decanting is young high end Chardonnay which often gets overlooked for decanting.
I also like to follow the development of young wines. With more mature Bordeaux wines, decanting makes perfect sense. The only question is how long. For some wines, half an hour is enough, for others (1986 vintage 🙂) you have to decant the wine for several hours. Young wines become softer, older wines only really open up with aeration.
Hello Agnese,
Always fun (and educational) to watch your videos. Thanks for taking the time, and putting the effort, to produce another high quality, entertaining video.
I can offer my “two cents” of personal experiences:
• On the idea of taking the time (hours?) watching/enjoying the wine develop in the glass. Here in the US, sorry to say, most of us are not as “civilized” as you old-world dwellers… who view daily dinners (at home) as a leisurely experience to be savored with friends and family.
• Two hours before dinner, I usually pour my wine in a glass to breathe. Interestingly, during my (short) 15-30 minute dinner, I often see a marked difference in the wine's development… BUT ONLY AT THE END OF THE MEAL. Two possible explanations: 1) a physiologic one (e.g., perhaps saliva-related in the mouth); and/or 2) from the swirling (as I tend to swirl before EVERY sip).
• The most surprising finding to me, though, and it has been a CONSISTENT one: The wine tastes and smells BEST after leaving it in the glass (and in the refrigerator) for a day or two. Note: what I am doing here is slightly different from your experiment, in that my bottle is less full (thus, with more air exposure in the bottle), and it is corked.
Very interesting. I am no wine connoisseur at all and have always heard decanting is almost required. This is indeed a bit surprising but good to know — I admire science and scientific methodology like you did here . Kudos!
As you said, it was an experiment and nothing more. For me, wine in the glass doesn’t stay there very long! Thanks again for an interesting chapter.
I can say it’s all about the specific wine and the time you have when serving.
Aeration should allow the tannins, wood and other components to have a chance to come into better harmony. Too much time is just as bad as too little on some wines. And for others no account at all. Giving it natural time, that is not being hurried, via decant should be better, but sometimes not available due to serving time constraints. This is just one more factor that makes wine so different, sometimes complicated, but always interesting. So as always: Enjoy the sunshine held together by water🍷
However you need to. 🍷🍷
We do like to aerate our reds. We did a 1 hour, 2 hour, 3 hour, decant and nothing experiment. The decant was most popular with our small group of 6. So there you go. Its an opinion and they vary.
Use your Coravin to experiment yourself. Just pour a glass at e.g. 0-2-4-6 hrs and taste them right after you pour the last glass.
Hi Agnese! I loved this video, like all your videos. I do have a quibble, though: I think you mistake what happened under one circumstance with what one can generally expect. Most of us have had the experience of seeing a young red wine shut down in the decanter. I've had it happen quite a bit actually. BUT, most of us have also had the experience of seeing a young wine blossom in the decanter, too. Like you, I think the idea that all wines should be decanted — or that all young wines should be decanted — is flawed. But I also think you can be at this for long enough that you begin to get a sense of which wines, specifically, could use a decant and which wines are likely to shut down. (FWIW, very young CdP and Bordeaux are the two types of wine I have personally encountered shutting down hard in a decanter the most often.) Again, not meaning to argue. just saying I think it depends upon the wine! Take care.
Please make some merch T-shirt like the one you are using in this video Agnes. I would buy! Think about that, cheers!
I would say SOME wine needs to breath…but it's hard to know unless you already know if that makes any sense. Mine gets "decanted" when I open a bottle and don't finish it until the day(s) after. 🤪
I agree with you, Agnese. If you begin your interaction with a wine when it's poured straight from the bottle, then you get to experience and be part of its whole progression – and that can be illuminating and delightful!
Years ago the Australians did the experiment. They pulled a cork and left the bottle for 24 hours, then returned and opened a fresh bottle of the same wine. No one could reliably tell which wine was which. There is just not enough air getting to the wine to make any difference.
Yes! Nice work & agreed. Only old wines with a lot of sediment need to be decanted (off the sediment) to be clean tasting and looking. Right? A little gentle air seems to help young wines. Great old wines (like Latour) open UP over hours in the glass, but still need decanting> Or they get dirty and too rustic. Right? Great tasting and communication! Thanks so much!
Great one.
I am of your same mind, however I’d like you to repeat the experiment to confirm if things are as we have just seen.
I believe wine is best at the opening.
I want to fall in love with you – Shiraz fans
I get your point. I don't think all wines should/need to be decanted or that there is a general rule for it.
Personally, I always have a little taste when I open a bottle (a couple of hours before I intend to serve it). Based on that I decide whether to pour directly in to the glass later on or if I feel it will need a trip into my caraffe.
Great experiment 🙂 I drink a lot of Bordeaux. Quite often around 5-10 years old. I normally decant 1-3 hours depending on the wine, mostly to open up aromas. The few times I drink Bordeaux right out of the bottle is at dinners or at wine fairs. I tend to think that the wine right out of the bottle doesn't have as much identity and it's harder to distinguish with other wines, compared to wines that have had some air (or age for that matter). That's why I find tastings at wine fairs to be quite difficult (maybe along with the fact that wine tastings tend to use smaller glass than what you would normally drink in). However I would like to see this experiment conducted with a different vintage. 2021 is quite light, and often has that "jump right out of the glass"-factor to it. Would be interesting to see this with a 2018 for instance, where I think it definitely needs some time with air before being consumed. I'm not a wine professional btw.
You just saved me 60eur I was about to buy Riedel decanter.