How to tell if a bottle of red wine has decanted properly?

How to tell if a bottle of red wine has decanted properly?

The so-called hangover, simply put, is to let the wine have time to contact with oxygen after opening the bottle. Under the influence of oxygen, your wine becomes more palatable, more drinkable and more complex in its aroma. From "Drops of God" to "good wine must breathe" in "Game of Thrones" to "Open a bottle of '82 Lafite, the wine needs to wake me for at least two hours." Sober up seems to be necessary... But in fact, there are not so many opportunities for you to use sober wine in your daily life, at least not all of them need to wake up.

The wine that is really worth waking up is mostly attributed to one factor - drinking too early. Ideally, many great wines are designed to age for at least 5 to 8 years, and even the best wines for 30 to 50 years. The "base" of these wines is deep enough to allow slow aging in the bottle to produce complex changes. If you want to enjoy it in advance, you have to use oxygen to help, through the large contact surface between the wine and the air in the decanter, forcing the unprepared aroma to be released. It is not difficult to understand that although decanting can make a young high-quality wine more suitable for drinking, it can not match the complex style of her natural aging, and the test of time is incomparable.
The best way to judge which wines belong to the category worth waking up is to taste them before you open the wine: the wine worth waking up is likely to have a closed aroma when it is opened, and the aftertaste in the mouth is still good after swallowing, which can last for more than 3-5 seconds. In addition, this type of red wine tends to have strong tannins, while white wines are not low in acidity. Of course, the easiest way for the novice is if you buy a wine is a valuable brand name wine, open the bottle and find that the performance does not seem to be as wonderful as expected, then you can consider the decanter.

How long is appropriate to wake up?
Every good thing has its disadvantages, and so does sober up. If the hangover time is too long, the various flavor substances in the wine are easily oxidized and become an uninteresting alcohol solution. Therefore, the hangover time also needs to be controlled, too long and too short are not suitable.
For new vintages, the length of time to sober up is consistent with the wine's aging potential. The older the wine, the earlier you drink it, the longer you need to wake up. Of course, it does not matter if you are not familiar with the aging ability of each wine, because the most important thing is your tongue. When you taste a wine in a decanter every half hour (a careful sommelier might even wake up every 15 minutes) and notice a bright, pleasant fruity note, the wine is about as good as it gets.

Of course, with the advancement of modern winemaking technology, many fine wines are very easy to drink when they are young. In this type of wine, it is relatively difficult to judge whether the peak has reached or not at the first taste. Because many wines may become balanced, elegant and easy to drink before they fully bloom. Only when you find that the aroma of the last glass of wine can actually be a step up, you know that you have drunk too much. It is sometimes difficult to judge the suitability of this wine to reach the peak, and some top wines even have wine critics following them for several days to analyze the changes, but the good news is that this level of wine is only in the top 0.1% of the market.

A relatively good method is to reserve about a quarter of the liquor in the bottle before pouring. The narrow mouth of the bottle helps to draw in the aromas of a wine, which brings out the most pleasant fruity notes in the wine, and when you feel that the aromas coming out of the decanter are similar to the aromas you smell at the mouth of the bottle, the wine is almost ready.
In addition, for some high-quality pinot noir from Burgundy, France, without decanting, pouring in a Burgundy cup with a big belly to drink slowly, constantly observing her changes, appreciating the process of wine slow from the beginning to bloom, in fact, it is also a kind of enjoyment. For other wines, if you're not in a hurry, this can work (the cup is your best decanter), but it's especially good for red wines from Burgundy.

Other circumstances
Some wines have a strong, pungent smell of sulfur when opened, or an unclean, rotten, earthy flavor, both of which are caused by different sulfides. It occasionally appears not only in new vintages, but also in older wines. Usually, it can be eliminated by pouring the wine into a decanter for about half an hour.