When It Comes To Wine - Magnetism Beats Heavy Breathing
Here's how to make a marginal wine good and a good wine great! No fuss, no muss.

Theory: If you open a young bottle of wine half-an-hour before drinking it, the wine has a chance to breathe, softening the rough edges and making the wine more enjoyable.

Hypothesis: If a little aeration is good a good thing, then may be a lot of aeration is better.

Test: I assembled a panel of four of Napa Valley's top winemakers and set before them, in a blind tasting, five masked, identical bottles of great, tight young Cabernet, each bottle treated to a different time, or type, of aeration (breathing).

The Challenge: Could they perceive a difference? Is one method of letting wine "breathe" superior to another?

Here's what I did: I acquired five bottles of Beringer Napa Valley Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 1997, one of the great wines to come out of Napa Valley in one of the best vintages of the decade. I chose this for the test because it is still tight and young, because it is available across Canada (about $150), and because I like it.

I made sure that no bottle was corked or flawed. One bottle was opened 30 minutes before being tested; one bottle was opened two hours ahead of the tasting; one wine was agitated in a blender for 15 minutes; one bottle was placed unopened on the Wine Cellar Express coaster, a new gizmo that claims to hasten the aging of wine with magnets in the coaster; one bottle was opened immediately before being tasted with no breathing time.

The judges have professional, discriminating palates. They were Julianne Laks, winemaker at Cakebread Cellars; Scott McLeod, winemaker at Niebaum-Coppola; Joel Aiken, director of winemaking at Beaulieu Vineyard; and Rob Lawson, winemaker at Napa Wine Co. Surely, I figured, if anyone could distinguish nuances in the different - but same - wines, these tasters could. But to keep things on the up and up, I didn't reveal what they were sipping, or the hypothesis of the tasting.

We met at Cakebread Cellars. Each judge was asked to rank the wines in order of preference. To blend the judge's rankings, five points were ascribed to the wine liked most by each judge, four points to each judge's second favorite, three points to each judge's next favorite, and so on. In this fashion, the most preferred wine of the tasting might garner, at most, five (points) x four (judges) = 20 points. The wine least liked might potentially have as few as one (point) x four (judges) = 4 points.

I had already set up this panel tasting to determine the optimum time for letting wine breathe when Wine Cellar Express came into my life. The press material that accompanied the magnetic coaster made such seemingly outrageous claims that I felt I had to include it in our test.

"Simply place your bottle of red wine, unopened, on the Wine Cellar Express coaster 15 to 30 minutes and the wine will have a better nose, a richer, smoother taste than a wine not treated". That's what the company says. The coaster-makers claim that the gizmo gives the same results as if you aged your wine in your climate-controlled cellar for years". Which sounds like so much hokum - but the judges, in our blind tasting, rated this method of "softening" wine the best. If only by a margin of two points (see chart).

The wine liked second best by the group was the bottle that had breathed for two hours. The exposure to air softens the tannins and helps highlight some fruit components.

The wine opened for 30 minutes and the wine opened just at tasting time shared a common score in third place. Judges preferred the wine that had profited from longer air exposure, ranking the two-hour aerated wine higher.

The least liked wine was blender-spun. It had cooked flavors from the friction of the blades. I thought that perhaps this form of hyperventilation might "open" the wine more quickly, but, in fact, it killed the wine.

"Just pulling a cork and letting the wine breathe in the bottle for 30 to 60 minutes is not sufficient", says Scott McLeod, speaking for his peers. "Nothing beats decanting a young California Cabernet and letting it breath, in the decanter, 45 to 60 minutes". All the judges agreed.

The Wine Cellar Express coaster actually performed exactly as the press release said - it softened the tannins and acids in the unopened wine and gave a balance, which was not evident in the "straight" bottle that also was opened, poured and tasted. The Wine Cellar Express coaster is available across Canada in stores where wine accessories are sold. Get details at www.winecellarexpress.com.

Baringer Napa Valley Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, 1997.

Soon to be available here at WineXplorer's Oak Hill Springs Wine Country Store for UNDER $50!

By Jim White (Napa Valley, CA)

Courtesy: Wine Access Magazine, May 2002