Now that the holidays are upon us we look forward to sharing some of those older bottles with friends and family.  This can mean decanting wine off its sediment, and we thought we would provide a visual how-to that will walk you through the correct process.

And to make sure we cover the bases, we invite you to view two separate videos:  the first showing how to decant a wine that has been standing upright and the second how to decant a wine that you just pulled from your cellar.

A few footnotes:  If the wine is more than 20 years old take extra precautions pulling the cork.  Many are fragile and want to break in half if you aren’t careful.  It’s not the end of the world if this happens but it’s a lot cleaner getting Mr. Cork out in one piece.  Torque is your biggest enemy here, so make sure to use a corkscrew that has a long worm to fully penetrate the cork and that doesn’t bend the cork as it is being extracted.  In a previous post we featured a new opener called The Durand that combines a traditional cork pull with an Ah-So–you can see it here.

And don’t forget that any full-bodied, youthful wine– red or white–can benefit from the additional aeration that decanting provides. It’s not snobby–it makes perfect wine sense.