When and how to aerate your wine
Lots of questions swirl around wine aeration.
What is it?
Should you do it?
Do you need a fancy gadget?
We’ll answer all of your questions with the results of our own at-home taste test. We subjected wine from the same bottle to three aeration techniques, and compared notes to the taste of the wine right out of the freshly opened bottle.
Just for good measure, we asked one of our favorite winemakers to weigh in.
Keep reading to see how Steve Rogstad from Cuvaison recommends you aerate wine. Our test confirmed his recommendations are spot-on.
What is wine aeration?
Aeration does not necessarily require a fancy gadget. It simply means exposing the wine to air.
For example, pouring a glass of wine and letting it breathe for 20 minutes before you drink it is a form of mild aeration. Swirling wine in your glass before you take a sip is also aeration.
A helpful column from Wine Spectator explains that aeration causes oxidation and evaporation. Both of these can remove undesirable flavors like sulfites and ethanol. Introducing air to wine also enhances the good fruit flavors you actually want to taste.
The trick is to avoid overdoing it.
As you’ll see from our experiment, too much aeration can eliminate both the good and bad flavors, leaving you with a dull, tasteless wine.
Should you use a wine aerator?
You’ve probably heard a lot of advice on this subject from friends, winemakers, and companies that make wine aerators.
We prefer to trust our taste buds, so we arranged a test.
Our test included wine from the same bottle that had been aerated three different ways. We tasted the wine immediately after aeration, and then again 20 minutes later.
All of the tests were compared to the taste of the wine poured out of a freshly opened bottle with no additional aeration.
The bottle we chose was a Cuvaison 2014 Diablo Syrah. This is consistently one of our favorite wines. A 2006 Diablo Syrah was the top pick in a blind tasting dinner we hosted for friends a few years ago.
Three aeration methods were used:
Swirl in the glass
Decant with a Rabbit decanter that gently distributes wine down the sides
Aerate with an Epare pocket wine aerator
Here are the tasting notes for each round of tasting.
Right out of the bottle:
Smell: alcohol, tart fruit, leather
Taste: heavy leather notes competing with tart raspberry, bright acid, plum finish with mild tannins
Swirl in the glass:
Smell: leather notes and light blueberry
Taste: blueberry, light raspberry, mild acid, hint of leather, plum finish with soft tannins
Swirl in the glass after 20 minutes:
Smell: candied berry mix of blueberry and raspberry, hint of leather
Taste: blueberry, leather, raspberry, plum, light acid, and mild tannins
Rabbit decanter:
Smell: leather and some alcohol, hint of fruit
Taste: blueberry, leather, mild acid, mild tannins
Rabbit decanter after 20 minutes:
Smell: candied berry mix of blueberry and raspberry, hint of leather
Taste: blueberry, leather, raspberry, mild acid, mild tannins
Epare aerator:
Smell: blueberry compote, leather
Taste: hint of blueberry compote, mild acid
Epare aerator after 20 minutes:
Smell: candied berry mix of blueberry and raspberry with light leather
Taste: tart blueberry, light leather, light acid, light tannins
There are a few things that stood out for us from this test.
First, letting the wine sit in the glass for 20 minutes changed the flavors we tasted no matter which type of aeration we used. Leather and acid were much more detectable at first, but smoothed out with just a little rest. Good fruit flavors emerged and the wine became more complex.
Second, we tasted the same basic flavors in each round. The difference was the intensity of each flavor, and how well each flavor integrated into the overall taste of the wine.
Here’s our final taste ranking, in order of 1 (liked best) to 7 (liked least):
Rabbit decanter after 20 minutes
Swirl in glass after 20 minutes
Swirl in glass
Rabbit decanter
Epare aerator after 20 minutes
Right out of the bottle (no aeration)
Epare aerator
The Epare aerator was a distant seventh. Sally’s first reaction to drinking the wine aerated with the Epare was “That little gadget just killed the wine!”
How to aerate wine
We reached out to Cuvaison’s winemaker, Steve Rogstad, to get his expert advice. We’re big fans, and it was only fair since we were using his wine in our taste test.
Here’s what Rogstad had to say about aeration:
“I usually pour the wine from the bottle and the wine will tell me it wants more air. If I sense it does and I’m serving guests then I’ll decant and swirl the decanter a few times. For the wines I make, it’s usually the Syrah or the bigger Reds that benefit.”
Rogstad’s suggestions mirrored the result of our experiment. Notice the flavor of the wine improved with just a little time out of the bottle, no matter which aeration method we used. His Diablo Syrah is pretty bold, so it benefited from the Rabbit’s gentle aeration and decanting.
Some wines can have sediment in the bottle. Decanting the wine is one way to remove sediment, and some decanters (like our Rabbit) have a built-in sediment filter.
Rogstad suggested another way to remove sediment without over-aerating your wine:
“I think the trickier aerations involve older wines that you want to decant off sediment, but not necessarily give too much air. In that case I’d stand them up for several hours before opening and then open just before serving with a gentle pour down the side of the decanter.”
He also weighed in on aerator gadgets:
“I’m not much on wine gadgetry, so no, I don’t use any kind of aerator. I prefer a simple waiter’s corkscrew and following my nose.”
Like Rogstad, we also don’t recommend any gadgets. The Epare and similar aeration devices put too much air into the wine. It smooths out undesirable flavors like leather and alcohol, but it also eliminates the good fruit flavors and any complexity.
Gadgets are like sangria—good for making really bad wine somewhat drinkable.
The last word on aeration
A few years ago, a friend hosted a wine tasting party. Someone had a Vinturi wine aerator, so we all decided to try it out.
There were eight of us altogether. Seven of us felt Vinturi made the wine taste far worse than just gently swirling it in the glass, but one person liked it better.
That same person drank from the dump bucket later in the evening, so draw your own conclusions.
Do you like wine aerated with an Epare, Vinturi, or some other gadget? Or do you prefer your wine to be more gently aerated? The only way to find out is to do an experiment like ours.
Remember, if you like it, it’s good!
