My Confession. Not allowing time to open.

Argh! I feel like I need to get something off my chest. Come clean if you will. I can’t tell you how many times I have consumed, passed judgment and opined on wines, both young and old, before they have had a chance to prosperity open up.

I haven’t a clue as to why. I am relatively intelligent ( at least in my own mind), have experience drinking wine for a couple decades and yet still make this mistake. Even thought, I know better.

What side are you on. Over or under? Am I alone?

Most of the red wines I open are 10 years from the vintage or older and almost all of them are double decanted because I refuse to stick someone with a glass of sediment. I can’t recall a bottle that wasn’t much better when I’ve poured it anywhere from one to five hours later than it was when I first opened it. This holds as true for bottles that are 30 years old as those that are 10 years old and for every region and variety.

I agree. air seems to always help. I had a 1983 Pichon Lalande and a 2001 Y’quem this week. Both showed remarkable improvement after several hours

I bet 99% of us here are guilty of this from time to time, I know I am!

Not me. I always decant. Everything.

I do not generally decant, but I do tend to consume wines over two nights, so if it doesn’t show on night one it gets a second chance.

Thoughtful, Pleasure Delay is Pleasure Achieved… Take your time. You can always open up something else instead while you wait for the first wine to really blossom :slight_smile:. Nobody will have 100% track record, but approach each bottle like the two of you have allllllll the time in the world.

It all depends on how thirsty I am. Waiting is not my strong suit.

I typically decant. I often give it time. I just more often that not, finish the last glass thinking I should have started at that point vs finishing.

This really is a struggle. Lately, I’ve been trying to be more disciplined with planning my drinking decisions ahead of time to allow plenty of time for decanting if needed. Especially if I’m entertaining.

However sometimes you just pop something open, and while your palate may indicate that the wine will benefit from some time decanting, it’s just drinking well at the moment and your guests are eager to drink wine. Hard to open a bottle in front of people and tell them they’ve got to wait for a bit.

I have done this a lot as well.

Weirdly, the best solution I have stumbled onto is opening 2-4 bottles at a time, and then drinking a portion of each of them over 2-3 nights(not by myself). It lets me compare and contrast wines, or just focus on a favorite if one bottle is really lights out.

But mostly, the result is getting to see the wines tight, and then through a spectrum. And the percentage that show over the hill on day 2 or 3 is almost non-existent. Tonight a 2012 and two 2010s on day 3 are showing at peak or close to it. All three are much better than on the first night.

I try a lot of young wines and do not give them the benefit of the overnight treatment. I have been converted to the cause, however…

Lately I’ve started opening multiple bottles at the same time as well. At the very least, comparing and contrasting between the wines is an extremely helpful exercise in tasing. However one of the problems that happens all too often is trying to determine if a wine will truly benefit from 2-3 days of decanting/opening vis-a-vis just decanting it for a few hours. CT sometimes helps, but not always. In the same vein, planning wine consumption multiple days in advance does take away some of the enjoyment from the spontaneity of drinking a wine when the mood strikes. Tough balance to strike.

That is a really good idea and that is my new approach.

Sounds like a good plan. Except for the part about not drinking them all myself.

I am also guilty as charged. But doesn’t that really mean we are drinking the wines too young? I’ve never had this issue with a 60 year old BDX.

No not at all - old wine needs time to breath too. I always give the analogy of Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory needing time staying in that bed forever and he needed time to spring back to action.

I’ve had plenty of great old bottles that needed 2-3 hours of air to really explode. Just had a 53 LMHB two weeks ago that was pretty eh (cork popped - not double decanted for 2 hours then drank over 4 hours) until the last 30 minutes of the night. Generally written off until we got to the end and we were all stunned how long it took to shape into form.

Agree. I was talking about 2-3 nights.

Very helpful thread. Can you be more specific? When you open multiple bottles, do you decant them? For how long? How do you store overnight? thx in advance.

When I’m home alone for a week, I will often do what Marcus describes, because I like to have access to a white and a red, and even I won’t finish two bottles myself in a night.

When I’m drinking with Jonathan, which is most of the time, and we open just one bottle, the bottle rarely lasts much past the end of dinner and clean up. I tend to decant on average 30 to 60 minutes before we start eating, give or take, depending on what I know about the wine and how it showed the last time.

Sometimes the two of us will open 2-3 bottles of young(ish) white, usually Riesling, to check in on with dinner. Sometimes we finish them both, sometimes the tail end of one or both bottles goes in the fridge overnight. I’m in the camp of almost never thinking red wines are better on day 2 - some aspects may be more open, but they also almost always taste more flat and a little stale to me - so generally finish those on day 1.

Sometimes we think we should have given a wine more air, and experience that last-sip-was-best thing, but that just goes into the private note section on CT and I adjust my decant time on the next bottle. So to me, that first bottle wasn’t in any way a mistake, it was part of the (for me) delightful process of learning about a wine. The joy in this process is one of the reasons we almost always buy multiple bottles of anything we like. It’s so much more relaxed - to me, it was never the wrong time to open a wine, so long as it was delicious. I don’t have to stress or get anxious about it being the “right” time.