Breathing helps draw out specific flavors and aromas that one might overlook if it proceeds quickly from the bottle to the glass to your mouth. So the idea of letting a wine breathe is simply the process of exposing it to air for a period to soften flavors and release aromas.
If your red wine is young with chunky tannins, letting the wine breath for about 1 to 2 hours will reduce any harshness and bring out a more velvet-like texture. If your bottle is a lighter wine, or less alcoholic or concentrated in flavour, 30 minutes of breathing time should be ample.
That's why people swirl wine around in their glass. By increasing the surface area of the wine, the amount of oxygen the wine is exposed to increases. It's called aeration and it enhances the wine's flavor and scent. It's also referred to as “letting a wine breathe.” Deciding to aerate your wine is a no-brainer, then.
Not every wine needs to be aerated. For example, young reds with a heavy tannin base or a more complex, bold structure benefit from decanting over aerating so that their complexity and flavor profile remain intact. Same goes for older, more fragile wines (especially ones with sediment).
Aerating wine helps dissipate sulfurous or 'matchstick' aromas caused by the sulfite preservatives, but it will not remove the histamines.
The solution lies in a familiar brown bottle in every suburban bathroom: hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide oxidizes sulfites, turning sulfite into hydrogen sulfate, which does not cause the types of problems that are associated with sulfites.
Adding a few drops of hydrogen peroxide to your wine can help reduce the sulfite levels. Typically, 1 milliliter (about 1/4 teaspoon) of 3% hydrogen peroxide (available in pharmacies) should be sufficient to eliminate the sulfites from a standard bottle of wine with 80 mg/L sulfites.
Pour off a glass, re-cork the bottle and shake it up. That's all there is to it! Pour off enough to reach the bottle's shoulder, which is where it broadens out from the neck. This creates a greater surface area of wine that's exposed to the air.
You can decant the wine in your glass by swirling it. The swirling increases the surface area of wine to oxygen and aerates it just as decanting would. Buy the book, get a course.
Typically, the best way to do this is to pour your wine into a wine decanter, which is a wide, shallow container that exposes the surface of the wine to the air, and then let it sit for at least 30 minutes. There are also wine aerators, which help speed up the process—but require buying a single-use gadget.
Sediment can also clog some aerators. This can affect the flow of wine and potentially create a messy and unfortunate overflow situation. Therefore, a decanter is usually the preferred method to aerate older wines from the cellar. When poured slowly and properly, most of the wine's sediment can be kept in the bottle.
Allowing them to breathe too long can overly soften their opulent nature. Still, most young, tannic reds can benefit from some aggressive swirling and 10–20 minutes in the glass.
So, the 20/20 rule is to simply to put the reds IN the fridge for 20 minutes or so, and take the whites OUT of the fridge 20 minutes or so before serving. This will ensure that each wine is at the optimal temperature for enjoying all that the winemaker intended.
If you're serving white wine at a party, or over dinner, chill your wine bottle in the refrigerator. Then, 30 minutes before you plan to serve, take it out of the fridge and let it warm slightly before opening. Aging wines is another consideration when it comes to temperature.
Most wines will remain good for hours after they've been opened, and you don't need to worry about it—the whole time you are enjoying a wine, it's breathing. But if you're considering keeping an open bottle of wine overnight or longer, it will start to fade and take on nutty, earthy notes.
Cheap red wines should be aerated, as this helps bring out their fruity flavors and soften tannins. Cheap white wines generally shouldn't be aerated, as this can strip away delicate aromas and flavors.
aeration will help the tannins to mellow a bit, softening any harsh edges in the wine and making it a more pleasant drinking experience that isn't overpowered by a tannic punch.
Aeration exposes the tannins to oxidation, which softens their mild bitterness. White wines don't have tannins, so decanting them isn't really necessary. So, the whole “uncork it and let it breathe” thing isn't doing too much. It doesn't accomplish what you want.
The wine taste better the next day because you are allowing time for it to breathe. What is really going on when a wine breathes is it is being introduced to fresh air again, something that it hasn't had contact with for quite some time.
Swirling releases the wine bouquet.
When you swirl a glass of wine, you release literally hundreds of unique aroma compounds, which attach themselves to the oxygen in the air. This helps separate the aromas in the wine, enriching the smelling and tasting experience.
Added sulfites preserve freshness and protect wine from oxidation, and unwanted bacteria and yeasts.
As a rule, sulfites are found at higher levels in the cask wine than bottled wine, and are at much higher concentrations in white wine than red wine, when natural tannins help preserve the beverage.
The role of sulfites in wine is to preserve the color, flavor, and aroma that the winemaker intended, as well as lengthening its shelf life. Without these protective preservatives, wine is vulnerable to oxidation (which causes the wine to go bad, taking on a putrid, vinegar flavor), as well as yeast and bacteria.