Well said
Well, I think you are aware that swirling is to release aromas from the wine. It has nothing to do with decanting it.
Beyond that, when is a wine ‘fully oxygenated’? How do we know?
This is a bit academic. We age wines because we know that the slower process does things we cannot do simply upon opening them. If we thought we could do something more with them we would all be pouring wines in and out of decanters all the time or using other devices to put more air in them. Maybe a blender or a whisk? Does anyone here with experience in wine do these things? No. Because somewhere underneath we understand time is more important than slamming the liquid against the air. That’s why we know even when we decant a wine we don’t just immediately pour it into glasses. We give it some time even after we decant it.
But hey, try it. Open equivalent, young wines. Run a bottle in and out of containers. Let one sit open.
Of course we agree that aerating a young wine can only do so much, and can’t replicate actual aging. I don’t think anyone is arguing that. But what’s cooped up in the bottle, regardless of its age, is often somewhat masked by it’s anaerobic environment. Exposure to air (and some time, in my own experience) is what unmasks the wine, so it seems clear that splashing a bottle twice is going to help that process along more than just once. I doubt that you’ve saturated the wine with just a single splash decant. That’s all I’m saying.
I’ve been doing a zoom tasting with a local group every week, as others have done here. That, along with my normal experience over the years, has really hammered home that wines often change significantly with exposure to air, and most of the time for the better, both young and old. If the purpose of decanting is to try and move that development along - the “unmasking” of whatever is there to reveal at any point in the wine’s life - then double decanting should accomplish that even a little more. Would three, four, or more times do even better? Maybe, but obviously there is a point of diminishing returns. Out and back is convenient, and seems likely to accomplish most of what can be accomplished, so that’s what I subscribe to.
Within our small tasting groups, the terms have very specific meanings which, generally, everyone understands.
Decanting is the process of pouring wine from its original bottle to another vessel. The secondary vessel could be anything from a wide decanter to a narrow carafe or another bottle, depending upon the intent. Service is from the secondary vessel.
Double decanting is the process of pouring the wine into another vessel and then back in to its original bottle, or into some other vessel, but commonly it’s the original bottle. One is simply decanting the wine twice. It could be a quick process or there could be an extended period between decants, depending on the intent.
Splash decanting is a vigorous process essentially up-ending the bottle and pouring the wine into another vessel.
These are how our group uses these terms. Most often we are splash decanting young wines, or decanting the young wines into a wide vessel to maximize the surface area being exposed. If we say that we have decanted a wine for five hours, the cork was pulled, wine poured off into a secondary vessel and allowed to sit for five hours before service.
If I have double decanted a wine, I will note whether or not the wine was decanted for any extended period before being double decanted into its original bottle or other vessel. Typically I am double decanting a wine as quickly as possible while focusing on doing so very gently to remove its sediment before we leave for a tasting or dinner. I have yet to find a funnel with a screen that works for the finest sediment.
Luckily for us the restaurants we patronize know us and have never given us a hard time about bringing in a bottle that had already been opened…usually it means the staff is going to taste something older that they have never tried before and so are excited rather than concerned. Whether or not it is illegal by us, well, the bottles are in my wine bag and almost always in the trunk so not an issue. At the end of the night we usually leave any unfinished bottles for the staff and kitchen so it is rare that we would be traveling home with open (though always corked) bottles.
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There is a way to test the point in question, namely, does returning wine from a decanter back into the original bottle expose the wine to perceptibly more aeration?
- pour wine into a carafe with a spigot at the bottom
- wait (how long?)
- return wine via the spigot into the bottle or another vessel. This way the wine in the carafe will not be disturbed by the act of returning it
- wait some more (again, how long?) and compare
I side with Alan that a double decanted wine will be exposed to more air than one that has only been agitated a single time. Whether that would make a perceptible difference is another matter. I suspect it would be easier to tell on an old wine.
By removing wine in this way, you don’t disturb the meniscus in the carafe, but you would still shorten the distance needed for diffusion. Depending on the diameter of the carafe that could make a difference. Then time becomes a question. I’m betting a short time for step 2 and a longer one before tasting would be most likely to demonstrate a difference, but at some point, both wines become fully saturated.
Do you have data or a graph you could show us? That would be interesting. What would be really interesting to resolve some of the issues discussed above is the DO data comparing the undecanted, decanted, and double decanted wine.
Beyond sediment issues, I for one don’t have a good sense what is important chemically about decanting in terms of aroma development — increasing the availability of dissolved oxygen for chemical reactions, changing the release rates of various aroma compounds from the bulk liquid, or a combination of the two. I had always thought the latter to some degree but I would be interested in the chemistry if anyone can speak to it in more detail.
after you clean out the bottle do you rinse it with a little wine, or just leave some drops of water in the bottle?
Shake it a couple times to get most of the water out, that’s it.
As was pointed out in a recent thread, fretting about aeration — prescinding from the question of whether it is useful fretting or not — is essentially a post-Parker phenomenon among serious wine drinkers.
Fretting about wine in general is a geek phenomenon. If anybody wonders why “normal people” are often intimidated by wine, show them this thread.
This would make for an interesting blind tasting, I’ve always thought. Three or four bottles of the same wine, served double blind (preferably without telling the tasters what you’re up to), with each one having received a substantially different aeration/decanting/whatever treatment.
Since I think almost none of us have done that exercise (and really, you’d have to do it multiple times with different types and ages of wine to really draw any more confident conclusions), we taste wines with the awareness of the aeration and with our opinions and expectations of what that should do, and thus I don’t any of us know quite as well as we think we do how this all works.
Lots of great thoughts and discussion in this thread, anyway.
I don’t understand what you mean by not getting double the effect. Decanting by definition means moving liquid from one container to another. Doing it twice is exactly what the term describes.
I agree that the undecanted, single decanted, and double decanted comparison would be super interesting, especially following the DO of each over time. It’s a doable experiment - especially if you had magnums to allow for a larger number of accurate readings - though it’s not one I’d be able to do, sadly.
You’re in good company when it comes to not really understanding the role aeration plays in wines opening up: no one really does. We have mechanisms for certain pieces of the puzzle - tannin softening, for example - but most of it is still pretty unknown I think.
This my experience as well. I cannot think of a mature red wine not improved by decanting. I always take a small taste on opening and then consume more later and to my palate the decanted wine is better about 100% of the time.
I double decant for (a) to check for TCA or other flaws and (b) to remove sediment. No issues with restaurants accepting recorked bottles here in NZ.
In our tasting group we ask everyone to double decant when the wine is closed with cork. With screw cap there is no TCA issue and most NZ reds (under screw cap or not) don’t throw a lot of sediment. So ok to bring screw capped wines unopened.
Brodie
I’m renewing this thread because I’m gonna open a MACDONALD for dinner tonight. Everything I’ve read says I should double decant for a pile of hours. But reading this thread, I’m torn on whether the pour back into the bottle (the double part) is worth the 39 additional seconds of effort.
Any suggestions? 
Wouldn’t it be decanting and ‘recanting’ then?
Sorry - couldn’t resist the wordplay.
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Depends in whether you want to serve it from a bottle or a decanter. Like Alan said upthread I double to remove sediment, wash out the bottle and still serve from the bottle when done. Takes up less space in the table and there is no question what wine is what.
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I only decant back into the bottle if we need to free up the decanter for other wines or I’m going to transport the wine to another location, which is much easier in the bottle than in a decanter. If aeration is the goal, you will generally get more by leaving it the decanter which normally has a wider surface area than the bottle.
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Actually, Alan Rath provided scientific evidence a few years back that there is very little oxygen penetration of a wine sitting in a decanter. It’s the process of decanting that introduces the oxygen. There might be some evaporation of aromatic compounds with a large surface though.
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So is it exposure to oxygen that makes the wine better, or is it the opportunity for volatile compounds to escape that’s responsible?
My gut feeling is that it’s off-gassing when a wine sits in a decanter with a large exposed surface area, not oxidation reactions that start to occur once oxygen gets into the wine during decanting or double decanting.
This comment from Ben, especially the bolded part, I think supports the notion that chemical reactions involving oxygen don’t occur to a significant degree over a few hours:
Then I read this comment from Alan, and again I’m wondering if the effect is due to oxygen entering the wine and reacting with compounds in it, or is it volatile compounds exiting the wine. Or both?
Then I think about Francois Audouze’s slow oxygenation method. If you pay attention to what he actually says and writes, it’s that you smell the bottle on opening. If it smells bad, leave the bottle open for hours in the cellar without decanting and it will often (not always) be resurrected. If it smells good, put the cork back in right away.
Without getting into a debate over whether slow-ox works, it would seem that the only way it could have an effect is by volatile compounds leaving the wine. It also seems that this would happen faster with a larger exposed surface area. There isn’t any significant amount of oxygen getting into the wine if it’s just sitting there (see Alan’s “Putting a stake in the heart of slow-ox post), even if some wine is poured off so the surface area is a bit larger.
I don’t pretend to have the answers. Just some thoughts and the perplexing experience of having seen a wide variety of behaviors from wines that have been decanted, double decanted, and slow-oxed.
At this point, the only thing I can confidently say that decanting will do reliably and repeatedly is to separate the wine from the sediment. And even that’s a crapshoot with old Nebbiolo if you haven’t stood the bottle up for at least a month ahead of time.