What Exactly Is A Wine Decanter Anyway?

If you're not a wine aficionado, you may be puzzled as to why, depending on the scenario, a restaurant sommelier or a dinner party host placed a glass vase-like vessel in the center of your table. Maybe you thought its purpose was purely decorative, a fancy way to serve wine. Maybe you wondered why the wine in it hasn't been filled right to the brim, like it is in a carafe.

To put it simply, what was sitting in front of you was a wine decanter. It has two important purposes: to elevate your wine drinking experience by aerating the wine and separating any sediment that has fallen to the bottom of the bottle. When wine is uncorked, it takes a little time before all of the flavors and aromas that have been bottled up during the aging process fully release — what wine experts refer to as allowing the wine to "breathe" or "open up.

" Exposure to air also softens tannins –the compounds that can give wine an astringent, bitter taste — letting them become velvety and smooth. The purpose of a decanter is to let the wine "breathe" by exposing it to air and oxygen, and its unique shape facilitates the process. Knowing when to decant a bottle of wine Even though decanters can have different silhouettes, they generally have a long narrow neck that tapers open into a wide bowl design.

The wine starts to aerate as it's poured down the neck and continues to take in oxygen at the bottom. The other purpose of a decanter is to capture sediment, the bits of solid material that drop to the b.