The mystery of breathing

By Helen Coburn

How often have you been advised to open a bottle of wine some time before serving in order to let it `breathe'? Like most people you've probably often done it without quite knowing why. How can wine breathe anyway? And for how long should it be left to do this breathing?

In fact, for most wine drinkers, these questions are academic. Most of the wines we drink today are young or relatively young. For the most part they can be simply opened and poured. You can uncork a couple of hours in advance if you like, but it won't make any real difference to the wine. Only a minuscule portion of the wine's surface is exposed to the air anyway, and at this point in its life it will take at least several days to be significantly altered by the effect of oxygen ö and then more to its detriment than its advantage. Decanting, too, won't really affect the flavour and bouquet of young wine over a few hours. Red wine looks well in a decanter and it's convenient to have it ready on the table when you show in your guests. The fact is that it's really in the glass that the flavours and aromas of wine begin to blossom. That's why it's always a good idea to use large wine glasses not more than half filled. In that way you trap the bouquet and it doesn't just float away from a surface too close to the rim.

Just be careful of one thing, though. If you have decanted wine and there's some left over which you're unlikely to drink for a day or two, get it back into its bottle, re-cork it and put it into a cool place (the fridge, if it's white). The amount of oxygen present in a large, wide based decanter can spoil even a young wine very quickly.

When it comes to wines which are over 15 years old, the `breathing' business is a little more controversial. The difficulty is that oxygen can do a great deal of damage to some very old wines ö sometimes within minutes. If a vintage has been good so that the wine has had the right balance of fruit, acidity and tannin (if red), and if the cork is sound so that the wine is stable and untainted, then it will probably be quite safe for quite a few hours after opening or decanting. Very often, you will want to decant anyway, because an old wine will have thrown a sediment, due to colouring and other solid matter falling out of the body of the wine as it matures. But if the wine is very old indeed, or if it is not very stable, it can fall apart rapidly after decanting ö and this literally means physically. The wine will become brown, dense and muddy, perhaps with particles of solid matter, and it will not taste well. So if you are serving a wine, of say, 20 years old or more, the safest thing is to uncork it when you are ready to serve, decant it very gently and then pour at once. It's important to ensure that the bottle stands upright for a few hours before decanting so that the sediment can drop to the bottom. Keep an eye on the sediment as you pour ö real traditionalists set up a candle to shine through the bottle as the operation proceeds! ö and when it reaches the shoulder of the bottle, stop. Have large glasses and don't have them more than one third full. In that way the flavour and bouquet can develop in the glass as you drink.