If your wine is just a cheap drop to wash down your charred rump steak, is there any point waiting for it to breathe? Can aeration really make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear?
Most experts would say ‘probably not’ and would also weigh any potential taste improvement against the ridicule you’d face if your mates saw you earnestly waiting for your cheap cooking wine to breathe.
But as it turns out, there might be a point to doing it after all and I might have discovered a technique that gives you all the benefits without making you look like a pretentious pillock.
I owe this trick to our family friend Frank, who is a wine distributor in South Africa. He’s a gentle giant of a man with an extensive wine knowledge – knowledge enough, at least, to know the wine he peddles is mostly mass-produced battery acid.
Frank was round for dinner recently when Dad whipped out a bargain-basement red and started pouring, unaware that he was insulting my mother’s cooking with every tilt of his wrist.
After he’d poured one glass, Frank, who can spot a cheap red at fifty paces, asked Dad to hand him the bottle. Frank put the cap back on and started to violently shake the bottle like a victorious Formula 1 driver. “Right,” he said, handing it back to Dad. “Now try it.”
My glass was the next to be poured and a mass of bubbles tumbled into the glass. Frank explained it was a technique called ‘Hyper-oxidisation.’ The idea is to rapidly expose the wine to oxygen, which has the same effect as letting it breathe, but in a fraction of the time. Pouring out a glass is necessary to give the remaining wine room to move.
I tasted it and was pleasantly surprised. It seemed smoother and better balanced than I’d imagined. A comparative sip from the first glass confirmed it – the wine had benefited from its vigorous shake up, even if it did look a little disheveled in the glass.
So while this is only really based on fairly amateur science and I wouldn’t recommend shaking up your dinner host’s prize bottle of Chambertin, it might be worth a try next time you buy a bottle of wine and your first sip reveals you’ve made an error of judgment.
The great American food critic AJ Liebling wrote in his memoir Between Meals, "The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down." Damn right. Sipping, swirling and spitting may have its place in wine shows, but around here, it can fuck right off.
