Questions Uncorked

Jul 29, 2008

Hi Tom – Thanks for stopping by! A decanter can be a really useful (and beautiful) present. There are a couple of different scenarios where a decanter comes in really handy. The first is when you are drinking very old wines that have a lot of sediment in the bottom of the bottle. Older wines and Vintage Ports can need decanting “off their sediment.” The sediment isn’t anything bad or harmful, it can just be messy and not much fun to drink, so decanting the wine first can make it a lot easier to pour. When you are decanting a wine like this, I recommend that you either pour the wine from the bottle into the decanter very, very slowly and carefully, or that you pour the wine through a layer of cheesecloth or an un-dyed coffee filter to catch any sediment.

The other time that a decanter can come in handy is when you are serving a very young wine. Decanting a very young, tight Bordeaux, a wine with a lot of tannins to it, can help the wine open up a little bit. Decanting allows the wine to come in contact with more air – compared to when you just take the cork out and leave the bottle on the counter. If you think about how a wine can evolve and “mellow” in your glass after a while, a decanter can do much the same thing.

And while you don’t need to decant most wines, there is something elegant about serving a wine from a decanter. So go ahead and decant your wines into your new decanter – just two words of caution. The first – be careful when washing it and always make sure you rinse it really well and the second – if you know you are not going to finish a bottle of wine, then don’t decant the whole bottle into your decanter. Just decant what you think you might drink and leave the rest in the bottle. Cheers!