If you’re a budding wine drinker (or you know one) looking to ensure you have the most essential wine accessories, but without laying out big bucks, this is the right guide for you.

PART 2 – Something to pour the wine into – decanter

Decanters are a statement and the centrepiece of every wine aficionado’s dining table. Showing off aside, there are two main reasons to decant a wine:

1. To separate the wine from its sediment

If a wine – particularly red wine – is mature, it might well have developed some sediment. It’s perfectly harmless, but can taste unpleasantly crunchy, and looks quite unsightly.

Sediment is usually the sign of a well-made wine that hasn’t been fined or filtered too much; these techniques remove tiny solid particles that might eventually fall out as sediment, but they also take out some of the flavour compounds which made a wine so enjoyable.

Vintage port is a great example of a wine that throws a sediment.  It’s usually bottled quite young and not opened until after a few decades.  Look at this contraption:

Turning the handle slowly tilts the bottle, and hopefully the sediment is visible from the light of the candle, so you can pour the wine but stop it just before the sludge.

Sediment is far less common with white wine, and usually comes in the form of white crystals.  Again these are natural and not harmful – they are tartrate crystals, and their occurrence is often due to a positive quality decision by the winemaker.

2. To let the wine breathe

Here are two statements for you to evaluate, true or false:

A: Virtually every wine will benefit from some time to breathe

B: Simply opening a bottle is a perfectly fine way of letting the wine breathe

Whaddya think?

Well it is all down to opinion, but I reckon that A = True and B = False

As a general rule, the younger the wine the more time it needs to breathe properly.  This allows chemicals in the wine to react with oxygen in the air and hence aromas and flavours are unlocked.  Tannins taste softer, so young red wines really do benefit.

And as for just opening a bottle of wine to let it breathe, so little of the wine comes into contact with air that the effect is almost negligible over a few hours.  If you don’t have any sort of decanting device to hand, then just pour a glass and that will speed things up!

A word of caution for older wines – if fully decanted, which might well be desirable if they have thrown a sediment, they will go out of condition if left for too long.  I have experienced something similar at vertical tastings where wines have been poured out well in advance of tasting, and some from the last millennium were already deteriorating.

So, if you are on a budget, what sort of decanter should you go for?

I would argue that a simple glass jug will do a fine job, without costing the earth.  So how about this:

Less than 5 Euros/Pounds/Dollars etc – and stackable!

Now, if you want to take a bottle of wine to a dinner party or BYO restaurant, but also want to decant it to show it at its best, what do you do?  Double decanting is the answer!  So you’ve poured the wine into your glass jug / decanter, and want to get it back into the bottle without spilling.

The budget wine accessory you’re looking for is a Stainless steel funnel:

Part 1 looked at something to open bottles with

Part 3 will look at something to drink the wine out of…