My wife likes to tease me by saying that I “woefully under-decant.” I don’t think so. But it is true that I rarely decant. And I admit that a few times I’ve been burned by not decanting — take the example of the Glen Carlou 2005 Grand Classique I wrote about recently. In fact, the Grand Classique, which tasted “weird” when I opened it but delicious the next day, inspired me to review my theory about when (and when not) it’s a good idea to decant. For my guide, click here for more:
 
As most of you know, decanting is a process whereby you pour a bottle of wine into a larger vessel, usually designed to expose the wine to oxygen, so that it can sit and aerate. Depending on the wine, some people will decant for hours before drinking. The idea is that the exposure to oxygen softens the wine and allows hidden aromas and flavors to emerge. That’s it — unless you want to get into the snob factor behind decanting, which is definitely at play for some drinkers, since somebody apparently is spending almost $500 on penis-substitutes like this three-foot-high python-shaped disseminator.
 
The first instance in which, in my opinion, it’s a good idea to decant is when the wine you’re drinking is very fine and very young. See, unlike everyday wine which is made to be ready to drink (and indeed, 90 percent of all bottles of wine are ingested within 24 hours of purchase), fine wine is made to be unfit for immediate consumption. With collectible, expensive wines, the ideal drinker is a devotee who buys it every year, often by the case, cellars it, and enjoys it over time. She likes to witness how — because of the micro-oxygenation that occurs with the air left in the bottle, plus the tiny bit of porosity of the cork — the wine pokes its head out, blossoms, fades, and then dies, sometimes over the course of 20 years or more.
 
Sometimes, though, you just can’t wait. And that’s when a decanter comes in handy. It fast-forwards the ageing process, so that wines built for the long haul can be enjoyed in the short term.
 
The only other time I think wine should be decanted? Precisely the opposite situation: when the wine is very fine and very old. This is because after a fine wine has sat around for a long time, it tends to throw off sediment, and you don’t want that bitter, mucky stuff going into your glass. So decanting — even the seemingly pretentious method you see in restaurants, where the sommelier pours the wine from the bottle to the decanter over a candle — helps you see when the sediment starts to travel toward the neck, at which moment you stop dispensing. Then I recommend you serve the wine in the decanter immediately. In this instance, we are dealing with a wine at its maturity, so decanting is not about aerating. In fact, further exposure to oxygen can cause a delicate old wine to expire before your eyes.
 
So now you see why I rarely decant. Fortunately, it’s very rare that I risk infanticide on a fine young wine. Unfortunately, it’s even rarer that I get a chance to drink very fine, very old wines. In fact I might never decant if there weren’t two corollaries to my rule. For example I am coming around to my wife’s opinion that, young or old, French wine should always be decanted. She feels that Burgundy and Bordeaux in particular taste horrible upon first sip but then delicious if you revisit a half hour later. Alice’s axiom was reinforced for me recently at a dinner party when I poured sans decanting a 2002 red Burgundy, a Chambolle-Musigny from Pierre Bertheau et Fils. After we toasted and took our first sip we reared back, surprised by the utter absence of flavor. “It’s over the hill already!” I exclaimed, embarrassed. But on Alice’s advice we simply put our glasses at the end of the table and then came back 45 minutes later. And what a change. It was as if the wine woke up, gasped, literally filled its lungs with air, and was reborn with all its fruit and earth and spice flavors intact.
 
A final, related addendum to the rule: if a wine you expect to be good tastes bad, try decanting. Often, strange aromas and flavors can “blow off” in a decanter. Again, this may be especially true of wines of foreign origin, such as the Grand Classique from South Africa that got me started on all this. You can bet that (even though the Grand Classique is cheap, young, not French, but as it turns out delicious) I’m going to decant the weird stuff right out of my next bottle before I take a sip.