Decanting: The secret is out of the bottle

The first wine I ever decanted was a 1979 Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon (Oddbins, £1.99). I can’t have been more than 19 or 20 and was attempting a dinner party solely to progress a crush I had on a challengingly aloof beauty at university.

I had no idea why one decanted wines, but I had seen my pa do it and just assumed that was what one did when folk came over. I was savvy enough, though, to grasp that decanting my Bulg Cab meant I could hide the bottles and claim the wine to be far grander than it was. In the event, of course, nobody gave a damn and we all just knocked it back, along with the Blue Nun and Jack Daniel’s, and got happily sloshed.


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