The Art of Decanting: How to Decant and Why

Decanting takes 10 seconds, requires only a large, clean glass container, and can make your wine taste better. Yet most people don’t decant often enough, and when they do, they decant the wrong wines for the wrong reasons.

For example, how many of you decanted any wines this month? I don’t see a lot of hands raised; could be something wrong with my spyware. The point is, everyone’s hand should be in the air. If you’re going to drink a recently bottled wine that just spent the day bumping around town on a UPS truck, you should reach for the decanter before you even open it.

And this is only one category of wine that should be decanted, but usually isn’t.
“Almost every wine in the world does benefit from aeration,” says Karen MacNeil, faculty chair of the wine department at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus. “The only exceptions are wines we rarely drink — older, expensive Burgundies that could collapse with too much air.”

That’s the classic image of decanting: a sommelier carefully pouring a 1947 Bordeaux drop by drop over a candle to avoid getting any sediment in the clients’ glasses. That’s important for well-heeled diners who care about image. But for wine lovers, decanting older reds is a mistake. The aromas of older wine are ethereal; we don’t want them to disappear before we finish drinking the bottle. A little sediment at the bottom of the glass is a small price to pay for enjoying a trophy wine at its best.

Mature wines don’t need decanting; new wines do.

The reason is a class of chemicals called mercaptans, which are compounds with sulfur in them. They can mask the beautiful fruit aromas of your wine. You need to expose the surface area of the wine to air so they can recombine chemically. This is even more true of recently bottled wines, which may have been given a blast of sulfur to preserve them just before bottling.

Drew Langley, wine director at Providence restaurant in Los Angeles, says, “If a wine can’t stand up to decanting, it can’t stand up to drinking. I decant a lot of white wines here, especially wines that are oaked. Once you decant the wines, they become much more aromatic and expressive.”

In fact, with young red wines, Langley double-decants: He pours from the bottle into one decanter, then another, to get the wine as much air as quickly as possible.

At home, I decant wines at least three times a week, and I ask for decanters in restaurants all the time. I decant most screwcapped wines because those often had more SO2 added than cork-sealed wines. And any time I have a wine, red or white, that I think should be more aromatic than it is, I reach for the decanter.

Many of us have a fancy decanter that we got as a wedding present or housewarming gift; I have a few. But I most use a couple of very simple, cheap decanters because they don’t take up much space on the table. Again, decanter design is a conflict between image-seeking diners and wine lovers. The shape of the decanter doesn’t matter; a well-cleaned used pickle jar would do the trick.

The downside of decanting is that if you plan to drink your wine over two or three days, you might be better off leaving it in the bottle. I have put decanters half full of wine into the refrigerator with mixed results, both because the aromas of the wine can dissipate over time and because I often also have sauerkraut in my fridge.

But you can — and I do — pour the wine from the decanter back into the bottle and recork it. In fact, this is a secret used by some professional wine salesmen, who need their product line to show as well as possible soon after bottling.

So in sum, however often you’re decanting now, you should probably do it more. The same goes for drinking wine too.

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