Oh, that’s an electrifyingly good piece! It’s happily reinforced my decision today to not renew a subscription to a certain famous wine site and to stick with JR.com!!
Thank you very much - a perfectly measured, deeply satisfying and very useful article!
How kind of you to bother to write. I’ll make sure Ferran reads your comments as I know he put an enormous amount of effort into this, as I think is evident.
I think he plans to supply a wide range of different foods, and wines, for thought.
Agreed. Potentially very interesting and certainly worth bearing in mind.
I hope at some point these results would be confirmed in a properly blinded trial with more than just two bottles of one wine (which could easily have been in different conditions before the decanting) and more than two tasters. As it stands, the article can only point in the general direction of the conclusions which are drawn.
Just a small point: the experiment was done on two halves of the same bottle.
Yes, on reflection I shouldn’t get too carried away in that the sample size is only one, and it’s well known that it’s easy to be enthusiastic (for me to be enthusiastic in this case) about something than supports one’s preconceptions.
However, an area in which the ‘test’ could be developed is to ask what happens when a bottle is double-decanted; by which I mean taken off its sediment then returned to its cleaned bottle. I have friends who assume that the wine is ‘safe’ once it’s back in the bottle: that it will largely stop breathing. My instinct is that the wine continues to breathe, because the whole liquid has been exposed to oxygen via the decanting process. I notice in the test that the particular bottle went over 250mV of redox potential after 30 minutes, i.e., by the definitions given, it went into the territory of detrimental oxygenation. Obviously, different wines will oxidise at different rates, and the traditional assumption has been that older wines shouldn’t be decanted too long. Therefore the question of double-decanting would be interesting to include in a test: can one ‘protect’ a wine by double decanting, e.g. then safely be able to take it to an event where it might get drunk a few hours later.
[QUOTE=Peter Bamford, Nottingham;45665]Oh, that’s an electrifyingly good piece! It’s happily reinforced my decision today to not renew a subscription to a certain famous wine site and to stick with JR.com!!
Thank you very much - a perfectly measured, deeply satisfying and very useful article![/QUOTE]
Hear, hear. An absolutely fascinating piece. I have craved some sort of definitive judgement on if, when and how to decant for as long as I have been drinking wine (or wine that could conceivably be improved by doing so - the contents of the wine boxes that my mother used to buy in industrial quantities never seemed candidates for such additional coaxing of their flavours). However, although such a scientific approach to the subject is hugely illuminating, it surely doesn’t provide any universal truths simply because everyone’s palate is different. I rather like some of the earthy flavours that Ferran associates with the oxygen-starved sedimentary wines, and equally find excessively exuberant fruit not to my taste.
A case in point is some Cavallotto Barolo I’ve been drinking recently. When initially decanted I am a huge fan, with its slightly reserved fruit and brooding, earthy nature. However, after a few hours in the decanter I find the sweet cherry flavours totally swamp the other elements and become almost sickly. Clearly I need to ensure that a judicious quantity of sediment remains in the decanter in order to temper this fruit explosion. I hope my family appreciates the necessity of performing this scientific experiment as soon as possible in conditions suitable for such a serious undertaking.
Congratulations in any case Ferran for a wonderfully insightful article. I suppose one thing that does become clear is what an impossible job being a sommelier (professionally or socially) can be at times.
@Jancis. Yes, good point. I had not internalised that. But there could still be a difference between the two halves, unless it had been properly shaken up beforehand. Which could potentially affect other stuff. And then I believe the shaking up would need controlling for, particularly as most wine lovers don’t treat their wine like they do their ketchup.
A fascinating article. It appears to confirm what I recollect (I don’t have the book to hand) Emile Peynaud wrote in ‘The Taste of Wine’ that decanting was always necessary in order to remove sediment but otherwise, in his opinion, was not necessary.
champagne and high fermented belgian beers
Dear Ferran,
Bravo ! A most exciting research. Does it also explain perhaps (at least partially) why champagne, as long as it is sur lattes (and thus on its sediment) mature so slowly ? And our famous Belgian beers of high fermentation : they have plenty of sediment and evolve so slowly … (for many years)
Fascinating read, thank you Ferran. I can agree with all of it. It would be interesting to do the same experiment with fortified wines namely vintage ports.
Corked?
Could that first bottle of Toro have been a bit corked. TCA can strip fruit and leave a dullness with no evident mustiness.
Just to reiterate, the experiment was done on two halves of the same bottle.
(And to highlight the fact that Isa Bal is sommelier at The Fat Duck, so has no shortage of practical experience.)
Thanks for your comments…
Michel, thanks for your comments, I also love Emile Peynaud book.
Lieven, thanks, good point too, but research is needed on that as high fermentation beers and Champagne evolves in a reductive environment.
Isa, thanks for your comment, look forward to meet you again, I am sure you have many top suggestions for Vintage Port ;-), thanks for being such an inspiring person.
Andrew, your reference to the first bottle of San Roman 1999 might be correct, however without a proper analysis is impossible to know, and that was long time ago. I am not the most sensible taster detecting TCA, in a trial made with Antonio Palacios I realized that below 6nanograms of TCA I have problems in the detection while other tasters can detect it between 3-4 nanograms, so probably you are right on your comment.
Paul Serfaty, a very friendly chemist just contacted to point that mV are actually milliVolts and not miniVolts as pointed in the article. Thank you very much for that Paul and apologies for my mistake.
[QUOTE=Stephen Ricketts, London;45670]However, although such a scientific approach to the subject is hugely illuminating, it surely doesn’t provide any universal truths simply because everyone’s palate is different. I rather like some of the earthy flavours that Ferran associates with the oxygen-starved sedimentary wines, and equally find excessively exuberant fruit not to my taste.
A case in point is some Cavallotto Barolo I’ve been drinking recently. When initially decanted I am a huge fan, with its slightly reserved fruit and brooding, earthy nature. However, after a few hours in the decanter I find the sweet cherry flavours totally swamp the other elements and become almost sickly. Clearly I need to ensure that a judicious quantity of sediment remains in the decanter in order to temper this fruit explosion. I hope my family appreciates the necessity of performing this scientific experiment as soon as possible in conditions suitable for such a serious undertaking.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I agree here – I also rather like these ‘earthy’ characters, so don’t want to lose them entirely. When I do go to the bother of decanting a wine, I tend to do so fairly shortly before actually drinking the wine – I’m paranoid about finding out “the hard way” that this particular wine couldn’t cope with being decanted several hours in advance. Maybe I’m best off sticking to this?
Fascinating article, though, and I hope more tests are done to find out more!
Great, great article. Thanks
Will start straining against the sediment forthwith.
It’s always nice to have a second bite at a real Dolly Parton! I am just about to finish off half of a bottle of La Spinetta’s Pin 2005 14% abv (at least that’s what it says on the label) with my polpette di bue and a nice bit of pasta!
Cheers!
I thought this article was very interesting when it written over 10 years ago and I’m sure it still applies:
My question is whether there is an age of wine where it would make sense to keep it un-decanted to preserve its fruit? In other words would it make sense to not decant a claret that was at its peak or slightly over? I saw a YouTube video by an American MW who decidedly didn’t decant a 1998 Lynch Bages - which surprised me.
This was the YouTube video on the 1998 Lynch Bages tasting (see approximately 9 minutes 20 seconds in for his comments on decanting effect):
