Letting your wine breath...

[Royston]

My ex used to swear on letting red wine 'breath' before drinking, even if it was a cheap bottle. To be honest, the difference in taste is marginal to nil (and I couldn't really tell if it tasted better or not), also alcohol bonds with oxygen to form acetic acid (vinegar) so what exactly is the purpose in letting wine breath, and is there a 'connoisseur's' limit to the amount of time you let wine breath for ?

 

I'm just not convinced that it adds to the pleasure of drinking red wine. If anyone knows better, then I'd be interested, as to why it should improve the taste, and what their preferred 'breathing limit' is with their favourite wine.

 

I like dry Chilean, and fruity Californian red wines, if that helps.

[DaveC426913]

It definitely improves wine.

 

1] Exposure to oxygen mellows the tannic acids, which are the ones that are bitter.

2] It also gives the aromas time to build. Much of the pleasure and certainly most of the complexity of wine comes from the aroma, not the taste.

 

Wines high in tannins as well as young wines will benefit from a few minutes breathing. Decanting does a similar thing.

 

Different wines need different times to breathe. My sister brought a bottle over last week to share that needed 48 hours to breathe (!) to give the various "notes" time to formulate. But fifteen minutes is the usual time for most wines.

 

The pleasure and point of fine wine tasting is to build your palette to a point where you can pick out subtle differences in wines. Same can be done with cheeses.

[Royston]

Right, thanks DaveC426913.

 

I wasn't aware of the effect of tannins, and exposure to air...and I guess I was judging the breathing process purely on the taste, but not the aroma. But that makes sense, and was exactly the response I was looking for, so cheers

[JohnB]

Dave's got it. Like a good port or Cognac, much of the enjoyment is from the bouquet rather than the taste.

 

Snail, perhaps if you experiment a bit more with wines from other regions you'll notice the difference a bit more. Try here for a rundown on some Aussie wines.

 

(Sorry, just couldn't resist.)

[Royston]

Dave's got it. Like a good port or Cognac, much of the enjoyment is from the bouquet rather than the taste.

 

Snail, perhaps if you experiment a bit more with wines from other regions you'll notice the difference a bit more. Try here for a rundown on some Aussie wines.

 

(Sorry, just couldn't resist.)

 

Thanks, but I know my tipple...and I go for certain and specific wines, despite expense and region, I've tried varying wines in South America, France, Australia and African wines, as well as Spanish and Italian.

 

I tend to go for taste rather than bouquet (what a great word) that's probably why I couldn't see the benefit of letting wine breath.

[Glider]

After reading these posts, I cracked a bottle of Quervo and decided to let it breathe. I came back after 15 minutes to find that it wasn't breathing!

 

I had to give it mouth to mouth.

 

Oh yeah...

 

That's the stuff..

[bascule]

I buy mainly chianti, which you're pretty much always supposed to let breathe.

 

I never do. I have a bottle of Gabbiano Chianti Classico on my table. I didn't let it breathe... just started sipping. Mighty tasty.

 

I'm also the type to drink a heady nitro beer without letting it settle.

 

I dunno, call me a nouveau wine snob but, that's how I roll.

[Royston]

You and me both Bascule, all this waiting around business...letting a bottle of wine breath in our household, especially for 48 hours, would be considered as some sort of sick joke.

[JohnB]

Sorry Snail, from the OP I didn't realise how eclectic you were in your tastes.

 

I don't mind letting my wine breath for 10-15 minutes but like you, I think 48 hours is unrealistic. I find that bouquet in wine is like smell in food. I enjoy a meal more if it smells as well as tastes good. I must admit that I'm moving away from wines and leaning more towards good ports, spirits and that type of tipple. Cuervo Family Reserve is a definite favourite in this household.

 

BTW, did you read the link?

[Royston]

Sorry Snail, from the OP I didn't realise how eclectic you were in your tastes.

 

Absolutely, I'm not a fussy drinker...oh, I'm so uncooth.

 

I do tend to go for the same wines now though, but as of late, there's been lots of social occasions...so beer and the now very popular Pimms and lemonade, great with cucumber !

 

I don't mind letting my wine breath for 10-15 minutes but like you, I think 48 hours is unrealistic. I find that bouquet in wine is like smell in food. I enjoy a meal more if it smells as well as tastes good. I must admit that I'm moving away from wines and leaning more towards good ports, spirits and that type of tipple. Cuervo Family Reserve is a definite favourite in this household.

 

I do like a good reserve, usually at christmas though.

 

BTW, did you read the link?

 

Yeah, I enjoyed that, thanks !

[GutZ]

I only drink alcohol in terms of shots, so it becomes very redundant to either way for me. I can't sip it or take little bits, it's just annoying.

[bolonkib]

One way to classify "special" smells is to smell the twenty basic twenty amino acids, remember them, and classify any "special" smell under the category of one of the twenty amino acids. I did that over forty years ago, and I have tables of correspondence tables that have the twenty basic amino acids corresponding to analogous things:

> 1. itza, don, decider, alanine, dice: 4&2

> 2. imix, drun, distributor, glycine, 6&1
> 3. ik, ceph, memory, aspartic acid, 3&3
> 4. akbal, graph, encoder, tryptophan, 3&5
> 5. kun, un, extruder, hydroxyproline, 1&1
> 6. chachuen, fam, EPR, methionine, 6&5
> 7. cimi, orth, supporter, tyrosine, 6&2
> 8.*oc, tal, producer, threonine, 4&4
> 9. lamat, vau, internal trn., valine, 5&5
> 10. muluc, gon, output trn., glutamine, 4&5
> 11.*manic, pe, ingestor, lycine, 4&6
> 12. chuen, ged, storage, phenylalanine, 2&5
> 13. eb, med, channel&net, asparagine, 3&6
> 14. ben, gizga, EPA, cysteine, 1&3
> 15. ix, ur, reproducer, proline, 2&3
> 16. menn, mals, decoder, serine, 6&6
> 17. kib, veh, motor, histidine, 1&2
> 18. caban, pal, boundary, glutamic acid,1&5
> 19. eznab, nahath, input trn., leucine, 2&2
> 20. cuac, ger, associator, isoleucine, 4&1
> 21. ahau, gal, converter, arginine, 4&3
> *: These have been exchanged in modern times. EPR is
> Entropy Prodction Rate. EPA is Entropy Production
> Acceleration. And, trn. is transducer.

was too obscure for you. These words have meanings in different languages. For example, let's take the last one here, #21, ahau means flower, and is one of the twenty Mayan calendrical symbols.
It was amazing; Dr. John Dee, in the Sixteenth Century, presented the Enochian alphabet, whose names don't sound like the letters they represent, but, the names of these twenty-one letters mean the same as Dr. James Miller's subsystems in his book "Living Systems", the primary text book of living systems dynmaics.
For example in #21 the word "gal" is the pre-Aryan word for the living systems subsystem the "converter". One of the twenty amino acids produced from the DNA code, in this case "arginine", is represented here. The extra amino acid in this system is hydroxyproline, which is produced from a code in the "junk" DNA, the most important product of the "junk" DNA.
The DNA code is composed of combinations of four nucleic acids, giving 64 different combinations, like the Yi Jing. But, most of the basic 20 amino acids are produced from more than one of these combinations. These 20 amino acids compose proteins which build the body and assemble other compounds together to compose our complete body.
There are seven levels of living systems: cells, organs, entities (like us, animals, and plants), groups (like families, gangs, teams, etc.), organizations, societies, and suprasocietal living systems. All of these depend upon their 21 subsystems. If any subsystem is missing, a higher living system must provide a substitute, or, that living system with the missing subsystem will die.
The number combinations at the end of each line of correspondences represent the combinations of dice symbols, which have symbols to represent them: 1, . ; 2, U ; 3, / ; 4, O ; 5, X ; and 6, = . You will notice that these symbols span the usual dice symbols.
Now we combine these six into 21 symbols. The way I've seen the 4&3 drawn is a circle with a vertical diameter, which also represents the lette D. So, each one of these also represents a letter. Also, of coincidence for English speaking people, the compination for B is 4&6, which is a cicle with a horizontal parallel in it that makes this symbol look like a bumble bee (B).
Since we use these subsystems all the time it is organizing to notice them. For example, when we go grocery shopping for our family, we become the ingestor by getting the groceries, extruder by extruding the money to pay for the groceries, distributor by bringing the groceries to our family, and then we use the storage subsystem of our family (group) by storing the groceries where they are stored. And, if we decided what to buy, we were also the decider for our family.
But, every group, organization, society, and suprasocietal living system, has a decider that has been called a group mind. The Greek for "group spirit" is "demon", which comes from the Greek root "dem" from which we get the word "democracy". So, we have the group mind to help us. Then, that's literally "demonic".
The group entity is a magnetic flux circulating through all the medullas in the brains of all the group's members. But, us Christians are only supposed to have Jesus Christ as our group mind, "having the mind of Christ", and, being members of the "Body of Christ".
In the Middle Ages the ranks of these fallen "angels" were defined. The demon of a group was called an angel; for an organization, an archangel; for a society, a principality; and for a suprasocietal living system, a power.
Now you can see what was meant, "We fight not flesh and blood; we fight principalities and powers". To kill an evil principality,, we'll take Massachusetts as an example. Divide the state into two new states: east of the Conneticut River we'll name Eastwick; and, west of the Conneticut river we'll name Berkshire. Then watch the nasty, nit picking Massachusetts Souls turn nice.

Smelling licorice is like, but easier than, transcendental meditation. Licorice is synesthetically onomatopoeic to a hollow cylinder, and it stirs closed circuitry in the brain that goes confluent with the circuit that is the entity so that near nonexistence, nirvana, is experienced. Everything is actually striving for nonexistence. Nonexistence is the ultimate essence of pleasure. The corresponding sound, the sound of a hollow cylinder, pronounced "eyennn", like the German word for one, "ein", means "nothingness", aleph yod nun", in Hebrew, and is onomatopoeic by meaning a well, but, it also means an eye and a ring. The movie "The Ring" plays upon this, the "lost word".

[John Cuthber]

 

One way to classify "special" smells is to smell the twenty basic twenty amino acids, remember them, and classify any "special" smell under the category of one of the twenty amino acids. I did that over forty years ago, and I have tables of correspondence tables that have the twenty basic amino acids corresponding to analogous things:

The amino acids are zwiterionic materials, they have very low vapour pressures and, consequently, no odour.

At best, you noted the smells of some impurities in the acids.