11-17 Air Your Wine

Happy Saturday. My husband and I had a delicious dinner last night at Pres a Vi in San Francisco, so I'm excited to do my first review review on our experience there, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. I have a little unfinished business from yesterday.

Yesterday I talked a lot about what air, and specifically how oxygen can deteriorate your wine. It is important to note that they can also be useful to each other. The most obvious way they complement each other is evident in wines that are considered to get better with age (time in the bottle). In general European wines fall into the ageworthy category and they are difficult to drink within a few years after they are bottled. In general, this is because they are high in tannin. Wine folks would call them "closed" or "tight". This describes the way they will make your mouth feel very dry and puckery. Overtime these tannins fade as oxygen slowly find a way to pass through a natural cork. This aging process can take 10 or more years. I know that sounds like an incredibly long time to wait for the bottle you just picked up. Not to worry, to help with our cultural impatience, American winemakers tend to make wines with less (softened) tannin. American wines are generally considered "ready to drink".

All that said, some of those ready to drink wines still don't taste great right when you open them. If the wine tastes to strong ("big") or if the wine smells a little stinky, a little air might help. You can always try leaving the wine uncorked and try it in a few hours, or cork it and try it the next evening. This is always an experiment, sometimes it can help, and sometimes it can't. Some wines are just not good. Sangria anyone?

As a final note, I want to make sure to clarify that air only passes through a natural cork, so aging does not occur in wine-in-a-box or wine with a screwtop, so don't bother trying to keep that box of Franzia to see if it gets any better! Interestingly, I had the opportunity to taste a wine closed with a screwtop that was 2 years old next to two other versions of the wine; the same wine closed with a cork and the same winery's current release. The aged screwtop wine tasted very much like the current release and quite a bit less fruity than the wine that had aged with the cork. Sorry if that was a little hard to follow, but its a little physical proof of all that I've been talking about. Someday soon I'll do another little experiment where I open up a boxed wine and see how long it continues to taste the same. It should last quite awhile because boxed wine is actually stored in a vaccuum-sealed bag inside the box which keeps air from contacting the wine even after its opened, since the bag shrinks as the wine is poured. One boxed wine's website claims that it will last for four weeks. We shall see! By the way, I'm only willing to do this experiment now that there are "premium" boxed wines out there. Its still quite a bargain, but supposedly tastes much better than the old boxed stuff. Premium boxed wine typically sells for around $20 for a 3L box. That's 4 bottles of wine for twenty bucks!

Cheers!