When wine is exposed to air, it’s fancifully described as letting the bottle breathe. Depending on a wine’s style and age, there are different reasons or ways to get desirable effects for your bottle.EyeEm Mobile GmbH/Getty Images
During lunch last week at Taverna dei Barbi, the winery restaurant on an estate in Montalcino that has been producing Brunello since 1892, conversation turned toward whether the young red in our glass should be decanted before serving. Our server (Lorenzo) quashed the notion: “If you decant a Brunello, you’ll kill it,” he says.
To his taste, the delicate fragrance of the estate grown 2020 sangiovese in our glass was best enjoyed by being opened 30 minutes to an hour before serving. “Leave the uncorked bottle, standing up in a cool place – not the refrigerator! – until you’re ready,” he explains.
His advice for serving an aged bottle is to open 24 hours ahead of time, once again, setting the uncorked bottle in a cool, dark place before serving. In this instance, he suggests covering the top of the bottle with the top of capsule or another barrier to prevent anything other than air from entering the bottle.
Many Italian winemakers in Tuscany and Piedmont aren’t fans of decanting their wines, especially older bottles, which they claim eradicates compelling aromas and flavours from reds made with sangiovese or nebbiolo grapes. It’s better to allow the satisfying characters to evolve gracefully, over time so you can appreciate the subtleties of the changing array of flavours, from fruity to savoury to floral and beyond in your glass.
When wine is exposed to air, it’s fancifully described as letting the bottle breathe. Depending on a wine’s style and age, there are different reasons or ways to get desirable effects for your bottle. Big and bold wines can stand up to more intervention than elegant or older expressions made from pinot noir, tempranillo or sangiovese grapes.
Simply pulling the cork or cracking open a screwcap will introduce air into the bottle. But there’s such a small surface area exposed that the effect is minimal compared to pouring a portion into a glass, carafe or decanter, which accelerates the breathing process by causing volatile aromas and ethanol to evaporate.
Using an aerator or double decanting – pouring a bottle of wine into a decanter and back into a clean bottle – will introduce more air into a wine in rapid fashion. Such intrusive practices are better suited to robust red wines, such as Barossa shiraz, California cabernets or South African reds.
Ultimately, how you serve your red wine is a matter of personal preference. Some wine lovers swear by gadgets that aerate the wine as it pours from the bottle to their glass and some hosts love the idea of serving guests from a decanter, while others, like me, prefer to serve their red wines straight from the bottle. That way I can enjoy the evolution of a good bottle of red over a couple of days, appreciating the structure and polished character upon opening and the supple texture and complexity later. At the risk of losing face with our host from Fattorio Barbi, however, I store open bottles of red in the fridge to help prevent oxidation.