In the last post I suggested that decanting a younger wine would make it more drinkable earlier. Decanting and letting a wine breathe are something that I recommend with most decent bottles of red wine. They are in essence pretty much the same thing.

 There are two reasons to decant a wine. The main reason is removing its sediment, the little bits of grape skin that are not filtered out during production, this is done by pouring the wine into a decanter, I use a basic glass jug it doesn’t have to be anything fancy like in the ones  in the photos, and leave a small amount of wine in the bottle for the fairies because they enjoy sediment!!  This also allows the wine to breathe by increasing the amount of wine in contact with the air, think of the difference in size between a bottle neck and the top of the jug! Not to mention adding air to the wine from the pouring process (the theory behind aerating funnels which are pretty handy if you don’t have the time to decant and wait on a wine to breathe).