You need time to love a wine

How long does it take to understand the flavors in a glass of wine? Right after the wine is poured into the glass? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? Or after hours of decanting? Why do we usually say that wines need to breathe?

To say a wine is “breathing” is to say a wine is being exposed to oxygen. A wine is “alive” in the sense that there are constant chemical reactions taking place, but wine doesn’t breathe in the way humans do. “Breathing” begins the moment a cork is pulled or a twist off is uncapped.

But if that’s all you do, the amount of surface area that the wine has that can be exposed to oxygen is only the size of a nickel. For more aeration, pouring a glass will help, as will swirling that glass around. To maximize the “breathing” phenomenon, though, you’ll want to use a decanter.

Typically, as a wine is exposed to oxygen, it becomes more expressive, releasing aromas and flavors. You would find more nutty and flowery fragrances in a glass of fine Champagne Taittinger Brut Reserve. Or give the Meursault Chardonnay 15 minutes, she will elegantly show you a journey to a garden of orange blossoms, with a basket of ripen apples. If you choose a bottle of Trimbach Riesling from the special Cuvee Frederic Emile, enjoy it slowly and try to discover the change of aromas from the time you just open it and after an hour or even more. The marl-limestone-sand-stone and fossil-flecked Muschelkalk composition of the soil, as well as the beautifully ripe grapes selected and harvested at the end of October lend this wine a remarkable personality: a dry and powerful Riesling, underlined by a mineral note and firm ripe acidity. But after decanting, you will be amazed with the vibrant worlds of flavors that this wine will offer, green apples, white flowers and even beeswax.

You would never know if the wine would show all of these flavors, if you don’t wait. As with human beings, you need to spend time with a person to understand her beautiful mind and appreciate the chance in life to meet such a person. You also need time to wait to understand and love a wine to the fullest.