Breathing wine
For centuries it has been known that decanting — allowing a wine to be in contact with air for a period — improves a red wine. A whole industry and wedding-gift business has sprung up as a result, from carafes to various devices that facilitate aeration and add a grave ritual.
So I thought I would share Nathan Myhrvold’s approach. Which has zero mystique and maximal logic - pour the wine into a blender and turn it on.
Of course it seems brutal and sacrilegious, but once you accept that the whole point of ‘breathing’ is getting air into contact with wine, then this approach makes sense. As a bonus, you might offend your wine connoisseur guests with this method too. The remarkable thing is, when professional oenologists are asked to perform blind comparisons, they either prefer the blended wine or can’t tell the difference.
Fear about the wine ‘breaking’ is unfounded. Wine is a liquid, there’s nothing to break. The energy input to the wine by the blades is nowhere near sufficient to break a molecular bond for example, and the blending process is too quick to cause heating. Any froth that may be generated quickly settles.
A closing quote from Nathan (he calls it hyperdecanting):
“In our own tests, we have never found a red wine that wasn’t improved (at least a little) by hyperdecanting — as judged by multiple people in blind tastings. Even legendary wines, like the 1982 Château Margaux, benefit from a quick run through the blender.”
