Let My Wine Breathe

Filed in archive Wine Resources on April 8, 2006

Many (many) years ago while at a college party, I was hanging out in the kitchen with a few friends when a party-goer, a young man about our same age, walked in with a bottle of wine in each hand.

"I brought the vino," he proclaimed as he waved the bottles over his head.

"Great," I replied. "Open them up and let them breathe."

He turned to me, and now, imagine this spoken with a very thick southern drawl: "Honey, this wine is too expensive to let breathe!"

I laughed a little, and admittedly, I really wasn't sure why I suggested he let them breathe other than I had seen that done in the movies. And as I stood there with my mouth open in surprise, another young man, who happened to be majoring in Hotel Management, proceeded to explain to him what I was talking about.

"She's right," he said. "It will make the wine taste better if you uncork them and let them sit like that for awhile before you drink it."

But, really, why exactly do we let a wine "breathe" or not? According to the Wine Lover's Page, breathing isn't always necessary:

In fact, most wines don't particularly benefit from this practice, and a few might actually suffer from it. In practice, exposure to air is helpful only with immature, ageworthy wines of the type that benefit from aging. Many Bordeaux, a few Rhones and some Burgundies, some of the best Italian red wines and Vintage Port fit into this category, as do their New World counterparts in the pricier realms of Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah (Shiraz) and a few others.

Read more "30 Second Wine Tasting Tip: Do wines need to 'breathe'?"