Giving oxygen to the ‘letting wine breathe’ theory

I’ve often wondered if allowing a young red wine of above-average quality to breathe for four or so hours provides any insight into how that wine will taste after extended bottle ageing?
P.C., Allambie Heights, NSW

A: I’ve often noticed that leftover young red wine can taste just as good the next day, or even two days later, with no more assistance from me than replacing the cap. By the third day, the bottle might be just one-third full, but it can still be as fresh as the first day. This is often observed with full-bodied reds, such as cabernet sauvignon and shiraz, but the latest wine to impress me in this way is a Tasmanian pinot noir, Andrew Pirie’s Apogee 2020 (a beautiful wine, by the way).

Being a more delicate wine, with less colour and less tannin than a full-bodied red, you might assume pinot would be more fragile. Not necessarily. I suspect a lot depends on how the wine was made. Red wines made in the Penfolds style, with a lot of oxygenation during the fermentation, followed by a relatively aerobic barrel maturation regime, tend to resist oxidation well. And we all know how they age if cellared: they have few peers in Australia.

As for facilitating short-term breathing of four hours or so, I think this is less likely to change the wine enough to give an insight into its future.

It turns out this subject has also been on the highly trained mind of Adrian Coulter, senior oenologist at the Australian Wine Research Institute. He believes that extended decanting and aeration won’t show you a wine’s future by some sort of speeded-up maturation.

“It cannot replicate the complex reactions that occur under anaerobic conditions during bottle ageing,” he says. The ageing of wine in a bottle is a reducing process, he adds, which is the opposite of oxidation.

But he also points out that, in general, the red wines that best resist oxidation are likely to be of higher quality. This is because they tend to contain more phenolic material, mainly tannins, and the more tannin there is in a wine, the better its resistance to oxidation. Bingo!

Got a drinks question for Huon Hooke? thefullbottle@goodweekend.com.au

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