Wine, yes, but do the decanter and glass make a difference? If you think all you need to enjoy a glass of wine is a bottle of wine, a half-decent glass and a corkscrew (and maybe not even the corkscrew), where have you been?
You probably wonder what Facebook is, too.
Any wine-drinker who's had a pulse the last few years must know there's a huge range of wine-related consumer goods out there, and that it's expanding rapidly.
You can pay anything from $10 to $500 for a corkscrew. You can get any number of gadgets to preserve the wine you can't finish. You can buy glasses designed not only for red wine and white wine, but glasses customized for individual grape varieties and even for younger and older vintages of some varieties. As for decanters, they come in scores of shapes and prices, along with several different cleaning implements. And so on.
Inevitably, it seems, a few dubious items turn up in any growing consumer area, and one area I've long been suspicious of is gadgets that claim to speed up the "aging" of wines. You've probably seen some of these. They come in various forms and employ various technologies (some explained, some not) and they're based on the assumption that an older vintage of any wine is better than a young one, that an "aged" wine is better than a young one.
Now that's clearly not true. It is true that for a very small proportion of the wines made in the world -- I'm talking a fraction of one per cent here, and most wine-drinkers never taste one -- aging is beneficial. These are wines called vins de garde and they're made for aging. When they're young, they're unbalanced (young red vins de garde often have tannins that smother the fruit flavours), but over time the components integrate and harmonize. And "over time" can mean two, three or 10 years.
Most wines don't "age" in this sense. Sure, they get older, but don't expect your everyday 2006 $10 Chilean Merlot, $12 Australian Shiraz or $10 Chardonnay from southern France to taste better in 2010 than it does now. They might taste different, but they won't taste better because they're not made to age. They're made for drinking as soon as you get them home.
What you can do to improve just about any wine is to let it breathe, which means exposing it to air for a while. For many people, that means opening a bottle and letting it stand for an hour or two. But that sort of "breathing" makes no difference to the wine, because the surface of wine exposed to air is only the dime-sized surface in the neck of the bottle.
To make any perceptible difference, you need to expose as much of the wine as possible to air, and that's where decanters come in. Although they come in many shapes, the most effective decanter for young wines has a fairly wide bottom, so that when you pour a bottle of wine into it, the wine forms a broad, shallow pool. In other words, you want a big surface area.
Strictly speaking, this is aerating wine, not decanting it. Decanting refers to pouring wine carefully into a decanter so that any sediment in the bottle stays in the bottle. It's generally older wines that throw sediment, while younger wines -- the sort nearly everyone buys for everyday drinking -- are sediment-free. Both can benefit from
aerating, but it's older wines that are more likely to need decanting.
Aerating is important because even brief exposure to air can amplify aromas and flavours and soften tannins a little. But it's important to note that even if aerating changes the texture of wine, it doesn't "age" it or replicate aging.
All this is the lead-up to a tasting I organized a couple of weeks ago to test some decanters and a new product on the market called a "breathable" glass. This is made in Germany, and the advertising claims that "a wine poured into this glass for just two to four minutes will show signs of aeration equivalent to the same wine that has been decanted and aerated for one to two hours."
I asked two Ottawa wine experts to taste some wines blind. One was Cynthia Mar, a graduate of Algonquin College's sommelier program and the events registrar of the National Capital Sommelier Guild. The other was Vic Harradine, also a graduate of the Algonquin program and a former instructor in it. Harradine and I review wines for the winecurrent.com newsletter and are co-authors of a book coming out this fall.
I had them taste six pairs of wine blind and take notes on each and on any differences between the wines in each pair. They didn't know what wines they were tasting, whether the wines in each pair were the same of different, or why they were tasting them.
In fact, two of the pairs consisted of the same wine, one decanted for nearly two hours, the other poured directly from the bottle. Each of the other four pairs was also the same wine (that is, four different wines), but one was served in a "breathable" glass and the
other in an ordinary glass of the same size and shape. (The glasses were supplied by the Canadian agent of the "breathable" glass.)
What were the results? Let's take the decanted wines first.
I decanted a white and a red. Although it's unusual to decant white wines, it's normal to aerate them, as you'll see when wine professionals swirl whites in their glasses. The first wine was a KWV Chardonnay 2006 from South Africa. Did decant-ing it make any difference?
According to both tasters, the decanted bottle was more aromatic and they detected a wider range of aromas in it. That's pretty much what you would expect.
The second pair of decanted and non-decanted wines was Finca Antigua Tempranillo 2004, from Spain. Harradine noted that the tannins in the decanted wine were more subdued (as we might expect) but that the non-decanted wine was more aromatic. Mar described more differences between them, but also noted that the non-decanted wine was more aromatic.
In short, the differences between the aerated and non-
aerated wines weren't as clearcut as I had expected. You would expect some wines to show more dramatic differences than others, but neither the Chardonnay nor the Tempranillo I poured seemed to benefit as much from decanting as I had thought they would. That's the value of these blind tastings.
How about the "breathable" glass? Ideally, the wines poured into the "breathable" glasses should have been softer in texture and more aromatic. Were they?
Well, the results were all over the place. Take the second flight, where I poured Turning Leaf Reserve Merlot 2005. Harradine found absolutely no difference between the wine in the "breathable" glass and the wine in the other. (He did, by the way, love the wine.) But Mar found more complexity
in the aromas and flavours of the "breathable" wine, even if the other had "more intense aromas."
The third flight contained Villa Antinori 2003, a Sangiovese from Tuscany. Again, Harradine reported "no detectable difference." But this time, Mar thought the wine in the "breathable" glass had the more intense aromas.
On to the fourth flight, which contained Napa Valley Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon 2002. Harradine wrote they were the same wine and "if there is any difference, it's minimal, with the first (the "breathable" glass) being slightly smoother on the mid-palate."
Mar noted that the wines were "very similar," but that the first (in the "breathable" glass) was "less tannic, smoother." There were differences here, then, of the sort that support the manufacturer's claims.
The last of the "breathable"/ non-breathable wines was Alianca Foral Reserva 2005, a red blend from Portugal. Here again, Harradine thought the tannins in the "breathable" glass were softer, but that overall the differences between the wines were minimal. For her part, Mar found the "breathable" wine was more aromatic but that the wine in the non-breathable glass was smoother. A mixed result.
What does all this add up to? My reading is that there was no clear pattern of difference between the "breathable" and ordinary glasses. Wine tasted from the "breathable" glass seemed to be a little less tannic overall, as well as a little smoother and aromatic. But there was no striking and consistent pattern of differences, certainly not of the scale suggested by the various reviewers in the promotional literature that comes with the glasses.
In short, the "breathable" seems to make a small difference, and it's up to individual consumers whether that makes these glasses worth buying.
Today, four of the wines in the tasting. I've used Cynthia Mar's and Vic Harradine's notes, as well as my own tasting notes here.