It is commonly believed that you should let some wines breathe by opening them a few hours before drinking them, possibly decanting them as well. My first experiment to test this hypothesis was on Christmas Day 2014, with two bottles of 2001 Château le Meynieu.  I decanted one bottle for 3 hours and then opened a second bottle just before a blind comparison of the two, along with some of our dinner guests. There was very little discernible difference. I imagined one had a little more fruit on the palate, and that turned out to be the one that had just been opened. But I wasn’t sure of any real difference between them.

I wasn’t very satisfied with the experiment for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the wine was pretty ordinary, and for another, everybody knew they were different and was looking for it. So the following Thanksgiving Day, 2015, I chose a Barolo, a wine which people often say needs to breathe, and I used the Sesame Street method: each person was given three glasses and had to pick the one that was not like the others. One bottle was decanted 6 hours in advance, the other opened immediately beforehand. One guest served as a lab assistant, and, in another room, randomly chose and poured one of 6 possible configurations for each guest: ddb, dbd, bdd, bbd, bdb, dbb (where b = bottle and d = decanter). Nobody knew which position the odd glass out was in or whether it came from the bottle or the decanter, and each person had an independently and randomly chosen configuration. Here were the results

Only one person correctly picked the odd glass out, and, as it turns out, that person was me. Here are my notes from that occasion:

I had a feeling one of the three was more aromatic and spicier, more tannic on the palate, whereas the other two had a richer flavor on the palate. I was not at all sure it wasn’t my imagination, however. As it turns out, I correctly picked the glass that was not like the other two, but mis-identified it coming from freshly opened bottle rather than the decanter.

The reason I identified the odd wine out as coming from the freshly opened bottle was a hypothesis that the mostly like effect of breathing was to dispel some of the more volatile components in the aroma. Clearly more research was needed. I didn’t do my next breathing experiment until a few weeks ago, which I will describe in next week’s post.