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Walking you through the method of doing a slow (or soft) decant on an older bottle of wine.
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Mike: I'm Mike Supple with SuppleWine.com, and today I'm talking to you about decanting. There are different types of decanters, different types of wines and different reasons to decant. We're going to talk about decanting an older bottle of wine, using a method called a slow [or soft] decant.

When it comes to older wines, the main reason you decant is to help reduce the sediment that ends up in your glass. As wine ages, some of the color, some of the tartrates and various other particles come out of suspension and settle in the bottle. They're not bad for you, but they don't necessarily taste great and they're a little gritty. So you want to get some of those out of the wine and decanting helps with that.

Another reason you want to decant, particularly with older wines, is that you want a very slow oxygenation process to introduce a little oxygen into the wine. It's been closed for a while, stuck in that bottle, and getting some oxygen in there brings the aromas out and brings the flavors out. But you want to do it slowly and gently because it's an old wine. You don't want to abuse it - beat it up, bruise it and throw it around - so we do the slow decant. I'm going to demonstrate that for you now.

We have here a decanter - a glass vessel - designed wide at the base to allow more oxygen into the wine, and also designed so when you pour it, sediment is held down in the bottom while you're pouring. So we're going to do a slow decant here.

What that means is very slowly pour the wine against the edge of the decanter. You don't want it to be globbing out of there too hard. You don't want it to be slopping all over the place. Do a nice slow, even, gentle pour.

Watch and you can see as you get towards the bottom of the bottle of wine some thicker chunks of sediment. This is a 1996; it's not particularly old, so it doesn't have heavy sediment. So I think we'll be fine just pouring this all the way out. But if you are pouring an older bottle, just sort of watch as you get down towards the end. You can see some sediment building up in the shoulder area of the bottle. It sometimes helps to just leave a couple of ounces in the bottle. Yes, it's expensive wine and you don't want to dump too much, but you should leave a few ounces in there and it holds the sediment back, making it a more enjoyable drinking process for you. This wine's not too old, not a whole lot of heavy sediment, so we're just going to go ahead and pour that all in there.

You don't want to shake it around too vigorously. You don't need to keep it in there for too many hours. Again, we just want some slow exposure to the air. Just go ahead and set that bad boy aside. Let that breathe for a little bit while you finish preparing your meal, and you're good to go. That's a slow decant.