Wine Doesn't Care About Your Decanter

Your guests might. The wine probably won't.

Confession from all of us: we rarely decant. When we do decant, it is for one of exactly two reasons, both of which we will get to shortly, and neither of them requires a $400 piece of glassware trained to resemble a duck. We know the duck. The duck is fine. The duck did not, technically, ask for this. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The question we are here to answer, more or less, is the one you have been asked to accept for forty years without asking too many follow-ups. Does decanting actually do anything? Or does it just buy us forty-five minutes of looking, very deliberately, like we know what we are doing?

The short answer is: mostly, no. Most decanting is theater. Beautiful theater sometimes, the raising of the bottle, the lit candle (yes, in the year 2026, a candle), the slow considered pour, the reverent hush, the second considered pour, the second reverent hush, but theater. The wine is not, in these moments, significantly changed. It is being introduced to itself, in front of an audience. The audience is impressed. The wine is neutral about it. The decanter, especially the one shaped like the duck, is having, quite frankly, the time of its life.

The audience is impressed. The wine is neutral about it.

There are, however, two situations where decanting is not theater. It does something real. It does something you cannot achieve any other way.

The first is sediment. Older red wines — Bordeaux from the nineties, aged Barolo, mature Rhône — throw a fine sediment of tannin, pigment, and tartrate crystals that settles at the bottom of the bottle over the years. Nobody wants that in their glass. Standing the bottle upright for a full day beforehand and then slowly pouring the wine off the sediment — traditionally over a candle, so you can see the exact moment the sediment approaches the neck — is the practical reason the decanter was invented. This is not theater. This is engineering.

The second is aeration for young, tannic wines. A young Cabernet, a young Nebbiolo, a young Bordeaux blend — these wines carry a tannic structure that is, at first, tight, closed, and slightly angry. Pouring the wine into a decanter and giving it thirty to sixty minutes of open oxygen exposure allows the tannin molecules to soften and volatilizes the aromatic compounds locked inside. The wine, opened up this way, is a different wine. Not the wine it will be in ten years — that requires ten years — but noticeably better than the wine it was fifteen minutes ago.

Anecdote from one of us, offered in support of the above. In roughly 2002, one of our team spent an evening in the (then brand new) caves at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, decanting 84 old wines. That number is not a metaphor. It is, in fact, 84. There was a collector event; the guest list included a founder of a certain Napa institutions and a founders of a certain search engines, all of whom, you can be assured, are used to being decanted for. The wines spanned 1953 Beaulieu Vineyards at one end and 1982 Bordeaux, a vintage then in the early stages of becoming a legend, at the other. That range required, no exaggeration, its own cart.

The sommelier for the evening was a woman named Rebecca Chapa. She was in charge, which is exactly what you want on an evening involving that much old cork. Our team member was her second: the candle-holder, the careful hands, the person who got looked at, very slowly, whenever a cork crumbled from the sheer effort of being met by an opener. Some of the corks had been aging quietly since Eisenhower. Some turned to sand on first contact. Of the 84 wines, 83 made the cut. To this day we are not, in fact, entirely sure which one did not. The evening was, by every honest measure, unforgettable. It was also, unarguably, decanting.

So the honest position, which we will now hold, is this. Decanting is, in most situations, unnecessary. It is not, however, wrong. It is a ritual — and rituals do work in the world. They slow us down. They mark the occasion. They signal that a bottle is worth the attention we are, right now, paying it. If you like to decant a Tuesday Cabernet through a Riedel duck, decant a Tuesday Cabernet through a Riedel duck. Nobody at the table is going to argue with you. The wine will not notice. Your dinner guests will. And your dinner guests, in the end, are the reason we are having dinner in the first place.

Vinly, briefly. We do not, on the platform, sell decanters. We are as unqualified to recommend a $400 duck as anyone reading this. What we do sell is wine, some of it young and tannic, some of it old and sedimented, some of it in the exact middle of its drinking window where the question of whether to decant becomes, functionally, moot. If you buy an aged Barolo from us and want to pour it carefully off the sediment over a candle, we salute you. If you buy a young Napa Cab from us and want to jug it into a Pyrex measuring cup for an hour, we salute you. We have, historically, done both.

Decant if you want to. Do not decant if you do not want to. The wine, in either case, is on its way.

— The Sesh Architect (who is not, at this hour, decanting anything)

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NEXT DISPATCH · COMING MONDAY

“The glass, twelve times.”

Next time we look at the varietal glass — whether you truly need a different vessel for every wine you drink, or whether the industry has, at some point, decided your cabinet should look, at all times, like a Bunsen burner display. Bring an opinion. Bring, if you have one, a different opinion. Bring your Bordeaux glass. Bring your Burgundy glass. Bring, if you have him, Gabriel.

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