Decanting - Day 2
Described in The Oxford Companion to Wine (2nd Edition, Edited by Jancis Robinson, 1999) as an “optional and controversial step in serving wine, involving pouring wine out of its bottle into another container called a decanter.” The reasons given for decanting are to remove sediment, to aerate wine, and practical aspects of putting wine on the table before rather than during a meal, and showing off your fancy decanter. Again that name Peynaud comes up in the discussion on decanting as a way to provide air to a wine. The comment is essentially as stated by Peynaud in his book. The rebuttal? “However there are certain types of wines, Barolo most obviously, which may not have been included in Professor Peynaud’s experiments with decanting regimes, which can be so concentrated and tannic in youth that to lose some of their initial sensory impressions is a positive benefit.” Hmmm, the Barolos I tasted recently had several hours in glass before we tasted them, still seemed awfully tannic to me. They must have been absolute monsters out of the bottle! And I love how all of those experiments of Peynaud's are dismissed with a simple "may not".