Berger: The importance of decanting

The act of decanting older wines to give them air is a noble tradition that goes back many decades and was mainly used for red wines.

It’s a ritual that often was a regular part of serving old bordeaux, and the practice is still in evidence in classy Parisian starred restaurants. But few people practice it anymore, except those with ancient wines that are loaded with sediment.

Even though older red wines no longer command the attention of the majority of today’s younger wine buyers, decanting is today more vital a tactic than ever before.

And more for white wines than reds.

That’s because the wine scene has moved into a new era where white wines are better than they have ever been, and as such are being sold sooner than they used to be sold.

As a result, some wines are released to market earlier and are simply too young to be sold this quickly.

Young white wines (and many rosés) may be more in need of air when they are young than are any of the wines we once routinely decanted.

Three major factors in today’s wine are different than they were just a couple of decades ago. For one thing, grapes are being picked later than ever, leading to a lot more alcohol on average. This is true for all red wines, and leads to wines with richer textures.

Decanting such red wines can help make them a bit more harmonious in their youth.

Secondly, such later picking produces wines with lower acidity (and consequently higher pH levels), which leads to even softer tastes. Thus many wines remain flabby, and aerating them can make them taste smoother.

Third, demand has prompted wineries to release wines earlier than ever before, whites as well as reds.

Time was, cabernets stayed in the barrel for at least two years, and then two more years in the winery before being released. In the 1970s, it was routine to wait four full years before a wine was released.

In the past few years, that time frame has been trimmed by 25 percent; we are seeing cabernets at three years and even less, which has led to some bizarre situations. When such wines are released earlier, they typically do not get any real bottle bouquet, which comes from time in bottle.

Best treatment for that? Aerate the wine before consuming.

Then there are the white wines that are being sent to market within months of their fermentations due to high demand and shelf space that becomes available sooner than it once did.

Most white wines get a dose of sulfur dioxide at bottling to protect them from premature oxidation, but the SO2 in the wine itself can leave very young wines smelling odd.

Best bet in such cases is to decant the wine and get some air into it, to reduce the SO2 aroma.

Also, with many wines being bottled with screw caps, the level of SO2 in all wines must be measured very carefully before the cap goes on, and some wines will still show evidence of the added sulfur after may months in the bottle. Aerating such wines is one solution.

Another is to use one of the devices specially designed to aerate wine. One of my favorites is called the Winefall, a blown-glass invention that works extremely well in getting needed air into wines. It is made in Windsor.

A decade ago, I wrote that few restaurants had a proper ice bucket in which to chill wines that were too warm.

Today, the major failure in most restaurants isn’t the lack of ice bucket, but the almost complete failure to provide a decanter.

Dan Berger lives in Sonoma County, where he publishes “Vintage Experiences,” a weekly wine newsletter. Write to him at winenut@gmail.com.