Wine spends a lot of time cooped up. First it’s cooped up
in a grape, then a barrel or tank. Finally, it is cooped up in a wine bottle.
During all of this time, it is protected from too much exposure to air, for its
own good. But what is the single easiest, yet effective way to get the best out
of your wine? Expose it to air. Therefore, we raise our glasses to a critical
gadget for every wine lover, the wine aerator!
properly exposed to air before drinking. Though the years, creative inventors
have fashioned all sorts of devices to make this easier.
Many people swear by
the decanter. A wine decanter is a fancy term for a flask or pitcher. You
merely pour the wine from the bottle into the decanter, splashing the wine
around the decanter (on the inside! only the inside!) as much as possible to expose the wine to air.
Typically, these decanters are beautiful crystal flasks with very wide hips, which maximizes the surface area
of wine that is exposed to the air. Enjoy the lovely color of the wine in the
decanter for a moment, and then pour away!
lacking. That makes decanting pretty risky until we adopt a red-wine color scheme around the house. I prefer a wine aerator device. One popular aerating solution is the
Vinturi pouring funnel. This beautiful gadget sits between the wine bottle and your
wine glass. The wine is poured through the Vinturi device, which swirls it
around and dramatically increases the contact with air as the wine races into
your glass. Pretty performance art!
utilitarian aerating pourers. These amazing devices insert into the neck of the
wine bottle and serve as a stopper for those occasions when the night ends
before the bottle is empty. Don’t judge, that does happen occasionally! The
snap-top cap secures the wine and doesn’t add to much height to the bottle, so
it still fits in the fridge. But the best feature of these pourers is the
mystical filter mesh that surrounds the part of the gadget that fits inside the
wine bottle. Somehow this mesh screen mixes the wine with air as it is poured
into the glass! I can’t explain it, but I can enjoy it. The difference between
wine straight from the bottle and the same wine poured through one of these
babies is amazing. Another plus? They’re far less expensive than the
alternatives. That means that we have a bunch of them in the wine tool drawer in the kitchen and one
in our picnic basket. We have even been known to tie them to holiday gift boxes
for friends with whom we love drinking wine. They wash up easily and we haven’t
managed to wear one out yet. And you can believe that we’ve tried!
performance art? The crystal bauble? The working-man’s pourer? Let us know what
works for you!
About the Author: John grills a mean steak and is always in the market for another wine fridge. Believes that if a winery has more than 10 employees, it's probably too big. Buys wine faster than he drinks it, but who cares?
