2023 Is Looking Like a MONUMENTAL Vintage for Napa

[Alan_Rath]

Once everything is dumped in, and any short term mixing currents are settled, nothing happens. It just sits there. You could leave a tank for months, and it wouldn’t become more homogeneous.

See this thread for a practical experiment:

Putting a stake in the heart of "slow ox"

Ask how to handle a particular bottle before drinking, and someone is bound to suggest “slow-ox”. In a recent discussion of slow-ox, and breathing/decanting in general (here: The myth of letting wines breath) I argued that slow-ox can’t work because the diffusion of oxygen into a bottle (and, conversely, compounds which might escape the wine beneficially) is much too slow to make a difference to a bottle just sitting open for a few hours. Just a little digression on diffusion (apologies for the…