I decant and serve from the decanter (anywhere from minutes to hours later, most often 20-30 minutes). Almost every red (and occasional whites) we drink at home are served this way. This helps avoid sediment and provides aeration before serving, and I don’t see any benefit to pouring the wine back into the bottle. On nights where we are trying to limit ourselves to half a bottle, decanting half the bottle, putting the other half back in the cellar, and then going upstairs to dinner, also helps avoid the temptation to have “just one more glass” when the decanter runs dry.
I double decant back into the original bottle. Almost every red (and occasional whites) we take to a restaurant (which we do often) is served this way. This helps avoid sediment and provides aeration before serving, and the extra work of rinsing and refilling the bottle (I use distilled water to rinse out the sediment, then shake vigorously to get the bulk of the water out) is needed to avoid driving, and walking into a restaurant, with an open decanter. I make no special effort to make the bottle look “unopened” and have never had an issue with the restaurant allowing it.
Serve straight from the bottle. This is the occasional red (for various reasons, including laziness or being in a hurry) and most whites (and all pinks and bubblies).
I think the answer to your question in the first quote is “both, to varying extents”, which is the reason for your statement in the second quote.
I can provide some more information on the quote of me that you bolded, to make sure I’m not misleading people. I also know more about this now than I did 4 and a half years ago, partly because of my work and partly because curiosity gets the better of me.
It takes seconds for oxygen to dissolve into a wine through splashing. It takes hours to days for that oxygen to be completely consumed by the wine, even if no additional oxygen is introduced. That’s because some of the reactions that consume a lot of oxygen take a long time. However, those reactions do begin immediately, and some very oxygen-reactive compounds are present in small quantities, so it doesn’t take much reacting to get rid of them.
For example, by the simple act of double decanting, you can get a few hundred to a few thousand micrograms of oxygen dissolved into a bottle of wine. Only a few of those micrograms need to react with sulfur-based reduction-related compounds to have a meaningful impact on aroma. Some of these reduction compounds will react meaningfully with oxygen over the typical timeline of a decant (an hour or two) to reduce their impact. We’ve probably all observed that from a sensory perspective - and I’ve observed it chemically in real time on a GCMS - it’s actually really annoying because it makes these compounds hard to measure. Some reduction-related compounds are also very volatile, so might evaporate from the wine surface meaningfully over the course of a decant. It is hard to tell whether it’s reaction with oxygen or evaporation into the air that is causing the effect. Probably both, to varying extents depending on the composition of the wine maybe in another 4 and a half years I’ll have convinced myself to test the relative contributions of these effects.
I am not convinced by Alan’s arguments on oxygen not getting into a wine if it’s just sitting there, mostly because I think it’s possible that the combination of evaporation and the Marangoni effect acting on the neck of the bottle may be sufficient to produce some convective instability in the liquid. I’ve not wanted to wade into the topic on here because I haven’t personally tested this, and always figured Alan and I will probably bump into each other at some point, hash it out over a couple glasses of wine, and come up with some new experiments together.
There’s some other stuff going on related to redox but I don’t want to get too far into either the weeds or, at the edges of what we know, increasingly blind conjecture.
I’d just like to concur with the comments about decanting young whites helping them to open up. I find this very helpful in restaurants and where, absent a TARDIS, the wine is going to be drunk more or less right away. I think the simple act of pouring into a carafe helps as much as sitting around. It was a comment in an article by Jancis Robinson a long time ago about the effect on Wolf Blass Yellow Label Chard (I’m pretty sure that was the wine, but it’s a long time ago for my memory!) that got me interested in this. I get into some interesting discussions with restaurant staff on this sometimes.
I rinse out my wine bottle with bottled water from my dispenser (I never use tap water) and then place the bottle upside down in the dishwasher to drain. If decanted wine sits in my cellar for any decent period of time, the draining bottle likely is dry by the time I pour the wine back into the bottle. If not, shake it out like Alan suggests.
Another reason for using one (and, as suggested, with a finer screen than pictured) is that many bottles developing sediment will have a clump of sediment sticking to the bottle-end of the cork, but which will remain in the neck and stuck to the bottle after the cork is pulled. Of course, using my pinky finger to manually remove that bit of sediment often works just fine, having the strainer in the funnel is the easiest way to prevent that bit of sediment ending up in the decanter.
I’m with you on use of a clean pinky finger, Terry.
I rarely strain wine for sediment, but if I do, these are fine enough to catch all but the smallest particles. Just don’t think about their intended use.
maybe in another 4 and a half years I’ll have convinced myself to test the relative contributions of these effects.