Bob, you didn’t get it. I meant it as an expletive, as in, “Holy $hit, this is ENCYCLOPEDIC!!!”
Perhaps I needed more exclamation points. My purpose was merely to hint at the huge-ness of the undertaking of writing the piece. Sorry to be misunderstood.
Do Thetans give off thiols? Just wondering.
Thanks for the decanting note, though.
Bruce
Well, I will disagree wholeheartedly with the dismissal of the slow-o approach! 
IF, and I repeat IF you drink a fair amount of mature red Burgundy and older Bordeaux (let’s say 15-20 years minimum), then it is definitely the way to go imho. I used to decant everything, but now I decant nothing. But… I know that wines are different in their reaction to oxygen. and my limited experiences with Barolo as well as Tuscan wines indicates that they indeed do like a LOT more oxygen than mature Burgundy. That is also true for younger wines in general, and more full bodied and tannic wines. Bordeaux in general needs more air, but quite mature ones do very well with slow-o.
If you’re working with an older bottle of Burgundy or Bordeaux, chances are the fill is not in the neck to begin with! So saying that the wine will not breathe much pretty much ignores the reality of the typical situation with these bottles doesn’t it? I will always take out a small exploratory taste too, to see what the wine is like starting out, and to enlarge the surface area to silver dollar size or so. The amount of time for slow-o to work then depends on the wine, its body, age, density, etc. Some Burgs that initially seem oth will come back to amazing health after 4 - 6 hours. You have to experiment, to develop a sense of what is required. But in general, I would NEVER subject a fine and subtle old grand cru Burgundy to decanting. Not anymore anyway. The subtle vitality and complexity that develops with slow-o (and a proper quite cool serving temperaure) is usually lost when the wine is decanted, at least if the wine is mature enough. It gets “blunted”, for lack of a better word. Too much “softening” effect, which, otoh, can be beneficial for a younger, bigger wine…
Typically, my older bottles have been resting in the cellar for 15 years or more and the sediment settles quite firmly on the bottom and side of the bottle. You have to pour very carefully, with the front label “up” (the way the bottle has been stored) so as to not disturb the sediment. But age softens the “taste” of sediment too, so even if a bit gets into the last glass I don’t find it to be a problem. In fact, to my taste, like Monsieur Audouze, it is that last glass with a bit of sediment perhaps that is the deepest and most flavorful, in a good way!
It’s clear that we have plenty of (sometimes contradictory) anecdotal / experiential data re: decanting / audouze, but we really do lack a scientific study to advise on :
Plenty to analyse, but until then we’re just ‘aerating’ amongst ourselves ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
No complaints, we’re a discussion forum, and we’re expressing opinions.
regards
Ian
I’m struggling to figure out what is happening here. If you have a bottle of wine that has been sitting on its dregs for many years in the cellar why is it suddenly imperative to get the wine off its dregs as soon as it has been opened? Is this to prevent the dregs from being stirred up and is the assumption that some are too fine to be filtered out? Or is there something else going on?
Bill, this is contrary to my experience–that is, the idea that decanting back into a bottle stops the progression of aeration. I’ve gently double decanted numerous wines that are totally closed once they are placed back in the bottle, and 2-3 hours later found a wonderfully open wine.
Quarin’s reasoning regarding double-decanting is flawed. He says wine makers talk about gentle handling, etc., but he misses the point that that has to do with making the wine while skins are still involved. You can stir up the skins or do a gentle pumpover. You can press them hard or just do a gravity-run bleed. It is VERY easy to do an experiment at home to show yourself the difference. Take a cup or two of boiling water and throw in a spoonful of black tea. Let it steep for a while and pour off a cup. Then repeatedly press the leaves against the side of the pot in the remaining water. You’ll extract a lot more crap that you don’t really want. Or use a tea bag and just press it against your cup. It’s going to be crappy tea anyway if it’s in a bag, but you’ll get the effect.
Once the tea is in your cup and removed from the leaves however, you don’t have the leaves for more extraction. Similarly, the decanting, stirring, etc. is done to finished wine, not the skins and must that you may want to treat more gently.
As far as decanting times, Bill talked about wines he’s familiar with and threw out some general guidelines. But as he points out, there are no bright-line rules. If you’re as familiar with the wines as he is, you figure out what to do over the years. But if you’re picking up a wine for the first time, you just have to learn.
A few weeks ago I did a tasting for some people and served them a pair of wines blind. A few weeks earlier, drinking a young CdR, I noted that it was improving immensely with time. So I bought two bottles, decanted one for five hours and popped and poured the second. Except for one person, they all preferred the second and couldn’t believe that they were the same wine.
I’ve done the Mollydooker shake on wines, particularly young whites that have a lot of sulfur. I never understood why Sparky advocated doing that with his reds, which are big and sweet and remain so after the shake.
Very good read Bill.
Too bad it doesn’t also count as a good post because there are no tasting notes and the tone is slightly dismissive of some people and you make a reference to flatus. Tsk tsk.
Oh, he’s a bad boy he is, that Bill! ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
A couple of things:
First of all, if it was not apparent to all, the quoted material all comes from a Wine-Searcher article by Tyler Colman, a/k/a Dr. Vino. Everything else is mine. I do not necessarily agree with everything that Tyler’s sources had to say, which is why I served up my own synthesis.
Brian, the answer to your question is “the chemical reaction between the dregs and oxygen”.
John, we need to fix you up with some 1964, 1978, 1989 and 1996 Nebbioli, and see if you do not find that the double decant has little impact upon the huge, structured wines of such vintages, but I am not inclined to argue if you are getting the desired result in 2-3 hours. As Greg suggests, it is about what works for the individual after adequate experimentation, but it is also about not settling for second- or third-best without knowing one is doing so.
My broadest experience is obviously with Nebbiolo-based wines, which are pretty much sui generis in any decanting discussion, due to the bitterness that the dregs can impart and the very fine particulate that, if it remains suspended in the wine, can ruin the entire drinking experience. I do not disagree with Paul Savage’s assertion regarding slow-o and Bordeaux, not because I believe that slow-o-ing has any utility, but rather, because mature Bordeaux quite often requires little or no aeration. I could not disagree more about Burgundy, however. For a light, very mature Burgundy, slow-o-ing seems to work only because little aeration is required. The deeper I got into decanting experimentation, however, the more I have found that old Burgundy behaves very similarly (but not identically) to old Nebbiolo. It seems to me that a lot of the crap that one hears about Burgundy having a 15-minute drinking window and if you miss it, you miss it is driven by people not knowing how to prepare and serve the wine. It is so that some Burgundies have delicate aromatics that can fade quickly, and I respect Burgundy lovers who choose to maximize aroma over drinkability. It is also true with both Nebbiolo and Burgundy that if you pop the cork on a wine that is simply too young, no amount of aeration or anything else is likely to yield a satisfactory experience. I say that “great Burgundy smells of shit” only until it is properly decanted…
Bill–I do have a few of those, but would greatly appreciate it if you would send me a few more.
If you base your decanting approach on what happens with a 96 Barolo, one could get mislead. I mean, you could nuke a 96 and it might taste the same at 2 hours as one you’ve popped and poured. My observations on the double decant would be more appropriate to a 2000 or 2005, but also say a 94 Rioja, or a middle aged burg. I agree totally with your comments on decanting Burgundy. I remember a comment on another thread that a burg that can’t stand up to a gentle decant is a Burg that can’t survive drinking.
John, for clarity, I do not base my approach (which I do not consider to be mine, by the way, so let there be no mention of “Klapping” a wine, in the manner of “Audouzing” or “Pobega-ing”) on any vintage, since the idea is to tailor the aeration to each individual bottle. I will say that I am not a beliver in weak or off-vintages, so most of my experimenting has been with strong-vintage wines from the 1960s and 1970s…
Tonight had a 1990 Drouhin Santenay premier cru ‘Beaurepaire’. Decided to not decant it–pop and slow pour to see if the no-decant burgundy folks are right. Comes out of the gate with slightly musty roasted nose without much fruit. Palate is sweet and broad, with reasonable acid. It took about 2 hours for mustiness to recede and a mulberry/pie cherry mature fruit to appear. by that time 2/3 of the bottle is gone. Quite nice toward the end.
this is why I decant my burgs. (actually I’m even more likely to decant my white burgs and Chablis). I suppose I could have opened 2-3 hours before and poured off a glass, but this requires a lot of work and if the bottle is fading you lose the wine before the guests arrive.
BTW Santenay is a great source for quality wine that’s affordable, and can age with the best of them.
But would you decant every 94 Rioja? I wouldn’t. The classic wines have been exposed to a lot of oxygen in their lives and there’s little sediment. We drank some 1990s today and there was hardly any sediment at all. They aren’t hurt by decanting, but I’m not sure it’s necessary either.
Paul, two other interesting points here:
The phenomenon of apparently shot wines coming back to life is even more profound with old Nebbiolo than with old Burgundy. Younger Nebbiolo will lighten with more air, while old Nebbiolo, even to the point of having lost its color, will darken. There is no chance that slow-o will facilitate that process better than decanting, however, and it may even keep the process from happening in the first place.
The “mid-to-low-shoulder” wine phenomenon does make a case for slow-o being more effective, since the greater the surface area of wine exposed the greater the oxygenation, but the degree is too small to matter. MA quarter to a silver dollar ain’t much. Also, low-shoulder wines, unless very, very old, have had less than perfect lives, and for that reason, you might find that the wines will not hold up during decanting. That is the one circumstance in which slow-o-ing makes sense, but it is a fallback position in my view. I found provenance to be the biggest difference between European sourcing and U. S. sourcing. I typically drink wines that were purchased upon release and have been sitting in the same cellar since, or better yet, I buy ex-cantina library wines when I can. Rarely have I seen 45-60-year-old Nebbioli that are not still into the neck. I have bought very little Burgundy and Bordeaux over here, generally importing mine from my U. S. storage facility, so perhaps Nebbiolo has an inherently lower evaporation rate than the other two, but I tend to agree with John that a wine that will not benefit from gentle decanting is probably not long for this world…
Awwwwww, Bill…you don’t want to a verb named in your honor?? You’re satisfied w/ just having a social disease named after you?? Awwwww…the shame of it all!!! 
Lots of food for thought in your OP, Bill. Especially as it impacts the B/B Nebbs. My take is that decanting/breathing B/B Nebb is somewhat of a crap shoot. Not very predictable
unless you’ve had multiple btls of the same wine. I’m not sure I want to drink a B/B Nebb over 12-24 hrs just to catch it at its peak. Sorta takes the fun out of slamming back a B/B.
So…I have a Balgera Inferno Nebb '10. How the heck am I gonna know how long and how to decant/breathe it to catch it at its peak??? Beats heck outta me.
I did the “breathing” experiment on B/B Nebbs some 15 yrs ago w/ my SantaFe group. Tasted the same wines side by side. One had been decanted 24 hrs before, the other
was P&P’d into a decanter at the last minute. They were not able to identify, on the 90% confidence level, the sample that had been “breathed”. True…just one meagre data point.
I probably chose the “wrong” wines.
Tom
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I find that any bottle of wine, after I’ve pulled the cork, is not long for this world, Bill.
Seriously, enjoyed reading your thoughtful analysis regarding decanting. Keep up the good work in posting your experiences.
A quick aside, the Oilers managed to defeat Montreal here last evening in a most entertaining game. Augers hope for the season. ![[highfive.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/d/db21b9263a9105e51f6f8b11e61dd4de095611f9.gif "highfive"){kind=small}
Hank
This is the best example that I can think of as to why one size will never fit all. On the other hand, no sediment, no need to decant, as with new-release wines. I take a look to see if there is anything at the bottom of the bottle that might make me want to double-decant or decant for a short time, but most of the time, Rioja can be popped and poured, as Greg suggests.
That hasn’t been my experience, but Greg, I’m sure yours has been far greater. Most all of the Riojas from 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s that I’ve had have come out of the bottle needing CPR, and have taken 2-3 hours to wake up, which they have generally done in a remarkable manner. Those from the 90’s have not been quite this bad, but the theme has been the same. Would the result have been the same if I just opened them 3 hrs before and left them in bottle? Perhaps, but the one occasion where I didn’t dcant that I can remember (a Riojanas from the 80’s–?87–that just seemed fragile), the wine was far behind the rest of the flight, and finally opened beautifully at about 4-5 hours. Of course, here I’m talking about older Riojas, and perhaps the 94’s aren’t old yet.
Very true that the 1994s are not old yet but even with those from the 50s and 60s, I haven’t found the need to decant. Some of the better ones do indeed remain wonderful for hours, but I’m generally of the opinion that the few minutes of aeration in the glass is enough to wake them. Bill made an important point about provenance and I haven’t kept detailed notes at all about that but going only from memory, the wines that come directly from the bodega, whether consumed there or back in the US after having been brought directly from the bodega or purchased directly from them years before, tend to be the best. This week we had some from auctions and without fail, those were the ones that died fastest and would have been most harmed by decanting. Not all from the same auction but all from Christies.
Interestingly, when I’ve had them directly off the plane, having been carried over by me or someone else, they didn’t exhibit a lot of bottle shock either. At dinner with Basilio Isquierdo, the winemaker at CVNE for 20+ years, we had some from the 1940s and 50s that he brought over directly and they were astonishing - certainly mature by no where near fading and seemingly unharmed by the flight. It’s true we didn’t compare side by side and it’s all anecdotal but that’s just been my experience. Again, it’s not a lot of data and I’m sure there’s contradictory data, but in general, with very old wines, I’m more inclined to capture what I can initially. John Morris and Bill have said in the past that they find Nebbiolo to have a uniquely fine sediment and since both of them know a lot more about Nebbiolo than I do, I’ll accept their wisdom, but seems that is unique to Nebbiolo.