Decanting and Wine By Bruce Devlin, Winemaker, Three Clicks Wines

Why do we decant a wine? There are several reasons to decant a wine, but the primary being to remove the wine from any sediment that may have formed in the bottle. This is usually associated with drinking older wines that have been cellared for many years. The second and more common lately is to open up a wine and soften its body. Sometimes a wines aroma is inaccessible and the body tightly wound. Decanting can be a way of hastening the aging process that would normally occur over time.

The science behind the reason why to decant? As a wine ages, it undergoes natural changes in its makeup. Bruce Devlin, winemaker for Three Clicks Wines in Over time the tannins, generally short when first extracted Yountville, California, and his wife Danielle pose with cases of his fantastic Petite Sirah. into the juice, tend to join up together and become longer and longer tannins. Eventually they get big enough that they can’t stay dissolved in the wine and become sediment in the bottle. The shorter the tannin the more it tends to be felt on the palate. The longer they are the softer they feel on the palate. Oxygen or air can make these tannins combine a little faster. The quickie lesson here is if you like your wines softer in palate feel then you will probably decanted wines more. This will help soften wines.

The Problem? In the winery as a winemaker my duty on the white wines is to keep oxygen out of the grapes, juice and wine I make too keep the fruit as pure as possible. Any air in the wine, and I feel it is stealing freshness out of the final product. White wines don’t have the tannin to protect them. This is why we rarely talk about decanting white wines, and why I feel the white wine aerator/venturi products are as should only be used as a paperweight, and should rarely be used for their intent. The same is true for red wine. As we oxidize or aerate a red wine to soften the tannins, we risk losing the fruit just as in the white wines.

What I do? I personally like fresh fruit in my wines. I like my wines young. This may come from years of being a winemaker and tasting wines while they are still aging in barrel to right tannin and fruit level to go to bottle. I rarely decant a wine. The majority of the time if I am decanting a wine it is due to sediment in the bottle and the age of the wine. The other times I tend to pull out my decanter is see if I can improve a wine that is inaccessible in a flawed way. Sometimes aerating a flawed wine will make that flaw diminish just as it does to the fruit of the wine. This is my personal opinion, and I have several winemaker friends who insist I decant their wines and that they’ll be better. To their palate it may be. I admit I am a little stubborn on the subject.

My oxymoron? I rarely drink wine out of a small glass. I like a big glass with a lot of surface area for the wine to breathe. In a way it is a smaller decanter, and the wine can change while in my glass. A small wine glass drives me crazy, as it doesn’t let the alcohol escape or the wine to breathe. I was recently at a big trade tasting in San Francisco for an event dedicated to high alcohol wines. They had the smallest glasses. My nose, and not a giant nose by any standards, barely fit in. The shape of the glass and the small surface area just brought out the alcohol in the wines to me, rather than letting the wines breathe. Even my own wines at the event seemed discombobulated. So I guess for me I prefer to select my glass well and avoid the decanter. They are doing similar things.