Berry, I’m with you on your second paragraph. I love being able to pop a wine and follow it over the course of several hours, which is why I prefer to neither slow-ox or decant.
Yes I have. In general, popping and pouring old wines means I live with the mustiness that some older wines have and have to deal with them as they open up. If I have hours to follow them I can pop and pour, but why NOT slow-ox and avoid that initial closed phase? And if one is doing a dinner where you might only have the wine for a couple of hours… why wouldn’t you want it to show at its best vs having it be OK for most of the dinner and just hitting its stride at the end?
Slow-ox isn’t, generally, an alternative to decanting. It’s a technique to use on older wines to let them blow off that mustiness and open up slightly. The kind of wines I’d slow ox I usually wouldn’t decant.
And if you don’t want to be misunderstood, write more clearly.
I always use the slow-O method now, especially on the older Burgs and other reasonably mature wines. I used to decant everything and felt it improved my wines, but after reading Monsieur Audouze’s posts extolling the virtues of slow-O in old, even seemingly defective bottles, I gave it a try. Next time you open some 20+ year-old Burg and find it tired and maybe even “oxidized”, try leaving it in the fridge, in the bottle, for a minimum of 5 hours. I’ve had several such bottles miraculously come back to a healthy and very enjoyable state (after they lose some of the chill ). So it’s up to everyone to experiment for themselves!
BTW, slow-O is not just a slower method, it yields different results. What I mean is, the many reactions involving oxygen within the wine occur at different rates, and these are affected by the amount of oxygen available, and apparently in different ways. Think of this - if you put a roast into a 400 degree oven for 30 minutes, you will get a very different result than if you limit the temperature to 150 degrees, for ANY length of longer time. The longer time will not give “equal” results. With older wines, they LIKE the slow way, to my tastes and experience anyway.