There’s a lot more to good wine than simply popping the cork and pouring.

Considering that it takes over three years of production to get a good wine in your glass, it makes sense to spend a bit of extra time focusing on the lesser-known (but no less important) essentials to serving it. Here are a few:

Let the wine breath. But why?

Breathing is a strange term when applied to wine and even stranger ideas have developed around it. It’s generally accepted, though, that only red wine should be aerated.

Here’s a bit of science: Tannins are actually phenol molecules from the skin, pips and stem of the grape and when they are simple molecules (young) they bind very easily to protein. Tannins don’t look or smell or taste like anything but when they bind with protein (the protein in your saliva for example) the reaction produces astringency. This is the harshness you sometimes experience from young red wines with unripe tannins. Phenols aka tannins also react with oxygen. Oxygen allows phenols to polymerize into polyphenols – more complex molecules that, at a certain size, are too complex to bind with proteins as when a simple molecule. This is when an older wine tastes much softer and smoother – this process takes place naturally in the bottle very slowly, or we can reproduce these effects by aerating wine.

Decanting wine

It is generally a good idea to aerate younger reds. Older wines are decanted to remove sediment which is usually crystallized pigment, hence older wines are less purpley and more brick/rust coloured, after having thrown a sediment. Heavily oaked chards can also be aerated/decanted but this is rare, the tannin on these is minimal. I would say its always best to open your wine an hour or so before serving to let it breathe, the flavours open up a bit and develop.