Classic Wines

In-Bottle Decanter for the Holidays Video Transcript

Brian Freedman: Welcome to the Classic Wines Minute brought to you by ClassicWines.com; I am your host Brian Freedman, and today we're talking about decanting wines.

Now, you'll notice in front of me we have a beautiful assortment of decanters, some crystal, some glass, and now we have this small guy here. This is Soiree in-bottle decanter, probably looks a bit different from any decanter you've seen before, and we'll be addressing the benefits of all of this later on, specifically the Soiree.

So, the question is why do we decant wines, and no, it's not to make our dinner table look pretentious or fancy, although it helps. The truth is a wine like this, the 2005 Flora Springs Cabernet from Napa Valley is a reasonably well extracted wine, the tannins are a bit on the aggressive side, it's a big mouthful of wine, and oxygen can help to smooth out the rough edges and make it a little more approachable.

Imagine you've been in bad for the last year and you decide to go the gym, you need to stretch first, you need to get your muscles oxygen in order for them to be able to perform, same thing with many wines. So, we decant.

Now, with a normal decanter, and this one here is a beautiful example. As you can see what we're doing is we're actually increasing the surface area of the wine which means more oxygen comes in the contact with it. You can swirl it around and this will really open or aerate the wine. Great decanter like all of these are, but they do take up a bit of room on the kitchen table or breakfast table depending on how it is.

So, what we have here, it's a great device, the Soiree in-bottle decanter. You put it on top of the bottle so it takes up no extra room, and then amazingly enough it has this great rubber stopped it doesn't fall out, and you can see here when we pour this, and the wine is actually being agitated by these three dimples there. It's aerating it even more, you can see here with the bubbles on the side of the glass itself.

We tasted this earlier and like I explained it was a pretty closed tannic wine. Right on the nose, I am getting more chocolate, I am getting more red current aromas. It's just more approachable. Much friendlier wine, much easier to drink, it's much more pleasant.

Sometimes we get wines that actually need to be double decanted. So, instead of actually going from one decanter to another we can take Soiree pour it right into the other decanter, and we're really giving it basically twice the oxygen than we would before. Again, here you can see those air bubbles along the side. Great thing about this also is, you take it out, it has this hole in the bottom, you put it right into the plastic stand, it dries after you rinse it, no big deal, you don't have to worry about cooties growing in the back of your cupboard.

So, decanting wine, don't be afraid of it, don't think that you're going to look pretentious or snooty when you do it, it just makes your wine better. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

From all of you here at ClassicWines.com, I am Brian Freedman. Cheers.