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What Is a Decanter Used For?
by Cheyenne Cartwright
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Overview
In times past, wine lovers routinely decanted their wine to make sure it was free of foreign materials or sediment. With the advent of the modern winery, it's no longer necessary to worry about foreign matter in the wine, but decanting can improve the taste and aroma of just about any wine because the process incorporates air into the beverage.
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What Is a Decanter?
A decanter is a decorative vessel, usually made of glass, that holds wine or other alcoholic beverages. For centuries, wine lovers aged their wines, particularly red wines, for years to allow the flavors to mature. During this prolonged rest, foreign materials in the wine would settle to the lowest side of the bottle. These materials might be bits of wood from inside the barrels in which the wine had been aged before bottling, or of tannins that separate from the wine while it is resting.
When the wine drinker prepared to open a bottle, he would examine it in a strong light to determine if there was any sediment in the bottom. If there was, he would carefully pour the wine into a different vessel to eliminate the sediment, and then would serve the wine at the table in its new container. This process is called "decanting," and thus the vessel into which the wine is poured is called a "decanter."
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Contemporary Wines
While it still may be necessary to decant older wines because sediment has settled to the bottom of the bottle, for the most part, the wine made by modern wineries is filtered before it is bottled, so there probably won't be much sediment to contend with. But there is a very good reason to decant even inexpensive wine---all wine benefits from exposure to air.
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Adding Air
If you've ever opened a bottle of good red wine and immediately tasted it, you doubtless have found that on occasion, the wine will taste a little odd and may have an unusual or even unpleasant smell. If you leave the wine bottle open and upright on the counter for a few hours, however, the taste and the aroma of the wine will be quite different, and usually much better, than it was at first blush. The air that has combined with the wine is responsible for this alchemy.
Thus, it makes good sense to decant your wine into a crystal vessel as soon as you open it and then let it sit, with the stopper out of the decanter, while you prepare your meal.
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Process
You can simply pour the wine from the bottle into the decanter, but if you're worried that your hands might not be steady enough to do the job without spilling, stick a funnel into the mouth of the decanter and pour the wine in through it.
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Other Uses
Decanters also can hold spirits like Scotch, bourbon or gin. A group of decanters of assorted sizes and heights makes a handsome display on a sideboard and suggests your hospitality and willingness to accommodate your guests' tastes in aperitifs.
