We've all heard that there are wines you should let breathe, but it's not always easy to know how to decant wine. We've found a resource that gives you step-by-step tips on how to decant wine, whether it's young or old.
Decanting wine step-by-step
Decanting a young wine is easy -- just pour it into the decanter. Decanting older wine requires a little more finesse. Libbey teaches you how:
Stand the unopened bottle upright for a few hours (or a couple of days,if possible), to allow the sediment to settle to the bottom of the bottle.
Screw the corkscrew into the cork, not to push through the bottom of it. Remove the cork, and clean inside the neck of the bottle with a cloth to remove any cork particles.
Steadily, slowly and continuously, pour the wine into the decanter until the sediment reaches the neck of the bottle. The remaining wine containing the sediment can be discarded.
Never clean your decanter with soap. The soap residue can be difficult to remove due to the shape of the decanter, altering the taste of the wine. Instead, scrub the decanter with a brush, warm water and coarse
salt.
Conventional wisdom has long said that wine from a box isn't worth the foil it's bagged in, and jug wine is equally bad. Luckily, we pay no attention to conventional wisdom and we just found a great article about jugs and wine boxes. Brands include Dtour, Three Thieves, Banrock Station and Black Box; we have a feeling we'll be doing some research of our own if we can find these.
Stick around after the intro to find tasting notes and prices for wines ranging from $10.99 per liter jug to $37 per 3 liter tube (which may sound like a lot but breaks down to be less than $10 per 750ml).
Nothing grates on casual wine drinkers quite like wine snobbery. There is, however, one form of wine snootiness that has long been not just accepted but encouraged: disdain for jug and box wines. Newcomers to oenophilia quickly learn that it is not enough merely to eschew wines like Almaden Mountain chablis and Inglenook white zinfandel—you must trumpet your contempt for them. Suddenly, though, this once-surefire way of exhibiting discriminating taste is no longer such a gimme. That's because something new has arrived at the wine shop: jug and box wines that are actually pleasant to drink.
People are paying more attention to what they put in their bodies these days, turning more and more to organic products. The only problem we typically have with going organic is the cost - it usually costs way more to be conscientious about how you make your food, and those "savings" are usually passed along to the consumer. That's why we were blown away when we heard about Full Circle wines, which are made entirely from organically-grown grapes and available at Whole Foods for under $10.
2003 Full Circle Merlot, California ($7.99) - This is not a soft, lush and juicy Merlot, but good as a light dry red. The color is a muted ruby. The aroma is also muted, of dark cherry. The taste is dry and surrounded by simple dark red fruit. 84 points.
2002 Full Circle Cabernet Sauvignon, California ($7.99) - The color is ruby with a little gray-blue on the rim. The aroma has some earthiness and some black pepper spice. The taste is mostly dry from some light wood tannin, with a little black raspberry. If you like dry reds, it's a solid little everyday sipping Cabernet. 84 points.
2003 Full Circle Zinfandel, California ($7.99) - The color is light red with a tinge of orange on the rim. The aroma is muted. The taste is rich for the price, with juicy ripe red fruit and a little dryness to balance it all out. It's missing the big spice of a Zin, but it's very approachable. 85 points.
2003 Full Circle Chardonnay, California ($7.99) - The color is a nice pale yellow gold. The aroma has some pear and apple notes with a little wet cardboard. The taste has good tartness and fruit character; mostly ripe green apple mixed with a little smoky, nutty warmth in the finish. Surprisingly drinkable for the price, and I'd have no problem making this the everyday Chardonnay. 85 points.
I'll admit it. I've been reading Wine For Dummies lately. I never read this book straight through when I got it from my brother in law a few years ago. It sat on a table collecting dust. But lately I've been using it to try to get up to speed about French wine, of which I know very little. For those of us with rudimentary knowledge of wine and winemaking the first couple of chapters aren't very helpful, but a few of the later chapters on Italian, Spanish, German and French wines are easy to read and informative. (Tips on drinking Burgundy, identifying the Super Tuscans, Cracking the code of German wines, etc) The writers, Ed McCarthy and Mary Ewing-Mulligan, seemed to have fun writing this book. This is from Amazon:
Amazon.com
In Wine for Dummies, Mary Ewing-Mulligan teams up with hubby and fellow wine educator Ed McCarthy to guide us on an exhaustive, entertaining trip around the enological--that's right, enological--world. Though clearly experts themselves (Ewing-Mulligan is one of a handful of Americans holding the rare title Master of Wine), the authors assure us that even the most basic knowledge will undermine the very notion of wine pretension. It's as simple as this: "This wine is named for a grape variety. This wine is named for a geographical region. When they make this kind of wine, it goes into this kind of bottle." And so on.
I am finally ready to try wine in the box. To come clean, I've always thought of wine in a box as totally trailer park -- the stuff that your red-nosed aunt pours into a pink tumbler with ice cubes before parking it in front of Days of Our Lives. Well, my friend Anne, who has Gucci good taste, says Joel Gott in a box is pretty darn good. So I have decided to take her word and investigate further. The wine, a joint production of Joel Gott and a couple of buddies, is called Three Thieves (A brassy enough name) and it comes in a 1-literTetra box....you know those soft sided boxes they use for chicken broth and your kids' juice boxes. MSNBC reports that these wine boxes have been big in Europe for years. Vive La France! Anyway, Three Thieves got a lot of press when the company introduced its screw cap jug wines in 2004. I never bought any, largely because I never saw it at the store, though now I picture myself slugging it down while attempting some dance of my Celtic roots.The 2002 Napa Valley Cabernet jug was priced pretty fine at $11 a liter. Wine Spectator gave it an 87 out of 100 points, too, not bad for a jug.
Wine Spectator says the Bandit Tetra box quality is a couple notches below the jug.
The Tetra pack comes in California Merlot, a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Sangiovese. I am going to hunt down a few Tetra packs this week to review on the blog soon. Unfortunately, it has rained constantly here in SF so there will be no picnic with the Tetra boxes, though I promise to have an open mind and to not drink it from a Dixie Cup.
OK, so I've got six quarter-full bottles of good Cabernet sitting on my dining room table. I am in denial about tossing them out. I opened them four days ago for our wine party so they're probably all nasty by now. But I can't quite bring myself to toss them. Unfortunately, I've not tried anything that works when it comes to saving a bottle of wine and end up crying as I pour it down the sink. I've tried stoppers. They are pretty lame. Those plastic vaccuums don't do much either. I'm too cheap to invest in some nitrogen pump that looks like it might blow up my house. Some say sticking a bottle of red in the refridgerator for a day or two will help preserve it. That's not worked very well for me.
Anyway, I was listening to NPR's interminable fund drive this morning and they were gabbing about a device called the ReServe Preservation system. (Give NPR $30 a month and you get the ReServe system and a tote bag free!!!)
According to the company's website, ReServe pumps Argon, the most neutral gas -- a gas that won't react with wine -- into your bottle. The website says that wiinemakers have used Argon for decades to top off barrels during the winemaking process because it safely displaces oxygen from the bottle to reduce oxidation of the wine. (Oxidation spoils the bottle.) Here's what the ReServe people have to say about the system, which looks like a microphone stuck to a pumping device that you stick on a bottle. It actually looks pretty easy to use. "In tests with recognized wine experts, ReServe preserved over sixty wines at "restaurant quality" by an average of over 6 days, a significant improvement over other preservation systems." A quick surf netted prices between $125 to $200 for ReServe, which is sold by Williams Sonoma and Marshall Fields. I hope to review the system in a future post.
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