Why do we need to decant red wine? Why do we need to decant red wine?

Many people have heard the phrase "decanting". What is meant by decanting does not mean sobering up after being drunk, but letting the wine sober up for a while, especially for red wine. This situation is very common. Why do we need to decant red wine? Why do we need to decant red wine? People who really drink red wine will know how to decant the wine and have special decanters. The taste of the wine will be purer after decanting. The floral aroma of the wine will also be stronger after decanting.

01 Sobering up is not so mysterious

There are two main purposes of decanting: to separate the sediment in the wine and to allow the wine to come into contact with air. Separation of wine sediment, mainly for aged wine. There are many types of sediment in wine. Except for a few wineries that do not filter when bottling, most of the sediment is the tannins of old wine that have aggregated in the bottle. This tannin polymer is harmless to the human body and will not affect the flavor of the wine, but it will affect people's drinking experience after all, so it is necessary to decant the wine, allowing the wine to enter the decanter and the sediment to remain at the bottom of the bottle. Imagine if a bottle of carefully stored old wine was opened at a memorable moment, but you drank the sediment. Wouldn’t it make you want to explode on the spot?

Allow the opened wine to come into contact with air as much as possible, especially for young wines. Wine is a fragile liquid by nature. Only after it has sufficient contact with nutrients in the air can it show its floral, fruity and other more subtle flavors as much as possible. If you see someone shaking a wine glass at the table, he is probably trying to release the aroma of the wine in the glass as much as possible.

02 Multi-dimensional wine decanting table

Most people are often confused by this question: Which wines need to be decanted and how long should they be decanted? The first thing to be clear is that in the world of wine, there are never absolute answers. There are so many types of wine that no one can tell exactly how many there are. So, to some extent, the question of which wine needs to be decanted can be defined as a false proposition.

However, we can still remain constant in the face of ever-changing circumstances, and gradually form our own independent judgment on whether to sober up or not through some basic rules and principles.

Among them, maturity is an important reference indicator. Generally speaking, young and good wine needs to be sobered up. Especially those tight and difficult-to-drink wines, they will be completely different after waking up. Red wine that has just reached maturity can be awakened in half an hour. If the taste is mature and the tannins are heavier, it needs to be awakened for one to two hours. For aged wines whose aroma is extremely fragile, the longer they stay in the air, the faster the aroma molecules die, so it is better to drink them as soon as possible.

Of course, there is a simpler, more crude, quicker and more effective criterion for judgment than maturity, which is price. Generally speaking, the lower the price, the less you need to decant the wine. Table wines priced under 300 yuan are good to drink right out of the box and are not within the scope of our discussion today. For more expensive wines, priced at over 3,000 yuan, it is necessary to judge the maturity based on the year and then determine the specific time to decant the wine.