Decant that WINE!

What if I told you there was a simple way to make ANY wine taste better? Let’s spill the tea on a tip for tastier wine. I have one word… DECANTER! Ever heard of it?

Decanters are containers made of glass or crystal that most simply helps increases a wine’s exposed surface area, allowing the wine to have contact with more oxygen, enhancing a wine’s flavor profile. On a more complex level,  increasing aeration, softens the taste of ethanol and the smell of sulfites for a more delicious glass of wine. Decanters also help reduce the amount of sediment that gets in your glass for older red wines. Decanters are not to be confused with carafes, though they look alike, the design of decanters serve a specific purpose.

Decant that wine!

So how do you properly decant your wine?

I’m glad you asked.

Since wine may be stored on its side. You want to stand the wine upright for anywhere from 12-24 hours before decanting.

For younger wines, you may want to use a method called shock decanting, or quick splash decanting. The wine bottle is tipped upside down into decanter, using gravity to quickly rush the wine from one container to the other. The focus of this method is maximum aeration, to maximize flavor, so it’s not good for older wines with more sediment.

Then there’s regular decanting, with this method slow and steady wins the race. Pouring slow with little to no splashing helps with maintaining the structure, texture, and color of older wines, while filtering out the sediment.

If you have a bottle of wine on hand with no decanter in sight, a pro tip is to use a blender and turn it on for 15-20 seconds to get more oxygen into the wine. Try it out and let me know how it goes! Happy decanting!