SNIFFING THE CORK by JUDY BEARDSALL & C.B. DESWAAN

Author:JUDY BEARDSALL & C.B. DESWAAN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ATRIA BOOKS
Published: 2002-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN SHOULD YOU OPEN THE WINE?

Among the many questions people ask me about serving wine, none occurs as frequently as, “When should I open the wine?” or “When should I open the bottle before my guests arrive so the wine can breathe? ” They are definitely two different questions.

Since I’m an ardent wine lover, I’m partial to every sight, sound, and smell associated with the opening of a bottle among other people. That popping cork is the precursor of all of the pleasures that are going to come, and I like to share it. I’d say the sound of the cork coming out of a wine bottle is both beautiful and anticipatory while the deeper sigh of a Champagne cork is romantic.

Even if I’m opening a special wine that needs decanting, I’ll usually wait until my first guest arrives to start proceedings. But my advice to you is: There’s no official protocol about uncorking a bottle, so do it whenever you like. If your guests are due at your house at 8 o’clock, you can be ready with your corkscrew at 5 o’clock. Either leave the pulled cork out or put it back in the bottle, unless you’re serving some great, old, rare, really fragile wine, which is probably not what we’re talking about here. Or wait until your guests arrive to open the bottle.

It’s very simple.

THE MYTH OF REMOVING THE CORK TO LET WINE “B REATHE ”

So, should you “let the wine breathe?” or as I was recently asked, “How much time should I give the wine to breathe in the bottle?” These questions are founded on the myth that wine breathes in the bottle when you pull the cork out. This simply doesn’t happen. As you already know by now, the only reason to pull the cork is for your own convenience—a matter of doing it now rather than later.

You can pull the cork and then pour four or five ounces of wine into a glass. Observation tells you that now the bottle has more air space in it—the space between the shoulder and the body of the bottle. The wine in the bottle will be exposed to more air and have some small measure of opening up. However, the real place the wine breathes is in the glass.

This is a very important piece of oenological information: Wine breathes in two ways, most efficiently and most classically in the glass or in a decanter, not in the bottle. This is why you should fill a wine glass to only one-third capacity. The other two-thirds of the glass provides enough air space for the wine to open up.

When we say that wine breathes, we mean that it releases all its aromas and nuances when it’s exposed to air as it comes out of a tight-fitting little container—the bottle it has been residing in. You can think of the space in the bottle that results from pulling the cork as an example in a physics lesson: The surface-to-air exposure in

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