One if the most popular wine accessories on the market are wine aerators. They claim to improve the taste of any wine instantly and fully decant it in seconds instead of hours.

In case you missed my post about decanting, you can find it here.

Decanting is a process of exposing the wine to oxygen which softens the taste and brings out additional, complex flavors. This is also referred to as “letting the wine breathe”. Simply put, wine tastes its best once it’s been exposed to air for awhile.

The old school way of doing this is to pour the bottle into a decanter, like this one, and let it sit there for an hour or two to achieve it’s maximum potential. The wide bowl of a decanter is designed to give the wine maximum surface area, exposing it oxygen the old school way. You’ll see this a lot at most high end restaurants that serve expensive wine.

Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the old school way (I have a number of decanters and use them from time to time) but most of us don’t want to wait an hour every night before we can enjoy our wine! There’s a shortcut to almost everything and decanting is no different. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the “decanting hack”!

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I get asked a lot about wine books. The assumption is that you can just pick up any book on the shelf and transform yourself into an expert on wine in a few short minutes.

The reality?

Most books about wine are boring and read like an encyclopedia. If you want to pick up an 800 page tome about French wine laws, rootstalks, malolactic fermentation and key wine negociats, then go right ahead. But when’s the last time you picked up an encyclopedia for fun?

The truth is there’s no shortage of wine books written for hardcore wine people, but most of us just want simple, practical advice that we can use everyday. We want to confidently pick a bottle of wine to enjoy with dinner. We want it to be an awesome pairing that our guests will love. We want to sound like we know what we’re talking about when our guests ask about the wine and the complements start to flow. And we want to be able to do this without studying long hours like we’re trying to pass the LSAT.

When you finally come across a book that helps make the everyday person sound like a wine connoisseur, it’s definitely worth a pick up. In my experience, there’s one book that does this above all others.

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