Decanting: “Optional and controversial step in serving wine, involving pouring wine out of its bottle into another container called a decanter. ” Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there seems a perception among some that decanting, or letting a wine breathe, is completely unnecessary and only useful for showing off an elaborate, expensive and glorified crystal jug at the dining table. For most wines, in fact for all white wines, it’s completely unnecessary, and I’m sure there are indeed those who just like doing it to show off their jugs now and again.

Before the art of filtration and clarification, wine, often poured straight from barrels, had a considerable amount of sediment left over from the wine making process. Completely harmless, and usually the sign of a good wine, it can taste and look a little unpleasant, so it was the norm to filter this out with the help of a decanter. Nowadays most wines have been cleared of this solid matter before packaging, but some will develop in bottle with age.

The best reason I can see for using a decanter is to let the wine aerate. The large surface area in contact with the air in the decanter alters the wine, softening its youthful bite and encouraging the development of the more complex aromas that normally develop with years in bottle. For this reason even those inexpensive wines can benefit from decanting, if a first taste reveals a tannic, grippy, youthful structure.

Now let me now introduce you to Gary Vaynerchuk, the Internets most revered wine blogger and owner of Wine Library, a $45 million wine business based in New Jersey, USA. Gary gets over 80,000 viewers daily, and in the attached video he compares a freshly opened Amon-Ra with one that has been decanted. We stock the 100 Parker Point 2006 vintage, so if you ever have an occasion special enough to open this kind of wine, please, pretty pretty please, decant before drinking..!

Ps. Decanters don’t have to be expensive either. You should pick one up for around €10.