I decant some, double decant mostly just to serve out of the original bottle, and mostly just drink without decanting, even for some fairly expensive wine. Thoughts on this article?
What is Double Decanting and Should I Care?https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/what-is-double-decanting-and-should-i-care/The basic practicality of decanting is unquestionable: some wines (not all) have either sediment or aromatic issues that can be removed by pouring the wine into another vessel, allowing scary malodorous compounds to drift away and the wine to "open" up.
Whether "opening up" is good for all wines brings us back to those non-decanting Burgundians, the argument being, in the course of that oxygenation, all the delicate, ethereal aromatics of a beautiful
Burgundy will fly away into the greedy atmosphere. Of course,
others claim to have had a "shocking number of fine old Burgundiesruined by sediment," insisting it's all a matter of timemore for
Bordeaux and
California Cab, less for Burgundy, a
ton for Barolo, etc. Add to this a doubling of the decanting processwhich, according to message boards, some seem to know as "Bordeaux decanting"and things get, well, doubly complicated.
To be fair, the rationale of "double decanting" is pretty simple: double the wine's exposure to air. "The double decanting wine method adds more air to the wine because the wine was exposed to oxygen twice, on the way out of the bottle and on the way back in." But since the question as to what really needs to be decanted, and for how long, is unsettled (Kramer says 15 to 20 minutes for most any bottle, compared to the couple hours recommended elsewhere), doubling oxygen exposure might not be a good thing.
From what we can tell, the main (and only?) benefit of double decanting is being able to serve the wine in its original bottlenot bad if you're a restaurant, but maybe a bit time-consuming, certainly a delay for your thirsty guest.
Again, as Kramer says of decanting generally, "what was once straightforwardly practical soon became endowed with ritual." Is double decanting a useful step, something that actually helps the wine express? Or is it just more lacquer of ritual when what most of us needquicklyis a decent glass of wine?
