Wines and SpiritsIts All About Breathing the Wine; not You!
All wine needs to breathe. Or rather, itò€™s best if you can leave it to aerate for some time. Generally thatò€™s called breathing the wine. There are ways and means of breathing the wine, but the popular way of just opening up the bottle and leaving it on the table to breathe is more or less a myth. Sure you can do it that way, but that doesnò€™t mean that you will be breathing the wine properly.
The best way of breathing the wine of course is to use a wine decanter. These are glass bottles with a rounded bottom half and a special funnel shaped top half. The purpose of the funnel half is made clear when you see the cone-shaped funnel which comes with the decanter. You place the funnel in the top half and pour the wine into it. There are slits cut into the sides for the wine to run through, with the bottom part of the funnel holding any sediment which might be found in red wines.
When the wine has been poured into the decanter you will see that there is enough space over it for the air to seep into the wine and for it to aerate. If however, you donò€™t want to go to all that trouble and buy a wine decanter straight off, you could always use something as simple as glass jug. Or if you donò€™t even want to go that far, then you could always just pour the wine into the individual glasses breathing the wine.
This isnò€™t something the experts will admit to doing all the time, but it gets the same results albeit for one glass of wine. Thereò€™s also the little factor of how long you should be breathing the wine to reap the maximum benefits. And I have to say that it does vary although not very radically.
I would have to say that the most radical variation on aerating times would be with the older wines. These can be very delicate in nature and should only be aired for about 12-14 minutes before the oxidation process will break down the delicate balance of the wine.
For younger wines you can let the wine aerate for longer, half an hour being the general stance taken on that. Although, if the wine is really young, then breathing the wine for longer is necessarry as this will improve upon the flavor of the wine.