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"How to decant..." A word about cork. There is a need and a place for cork in wining and dining. It certainly is not appropriate for corks to swim in the guest's glass or far worse to shake hands with the guest's taste buds. DECANT The set-up which I use for decanting is a candle and a carafe, with a wide opening. I have stopped using fancy cut lead crystal decanters after several customers complained for they were afraid of poisoning from the lead in the lead crystal.
At the table I show the bottle to the guest and make sure
that it is the right one. If it's an expensive bottle, I might even open the wine list and
compare in front of the guest the wine list's description and the bottle's label.
Experience has shown that it's difficult to return a five- hundred-dollar bottle to the
cellar after opening it, unless it's not drinkable. What I'm looking for when examine the cork in a bottle of expensive Bordeaux wine are signs of the bottle being recorked which is done. However most wines will have the original cork in it. Here the color of the cork tells me much about what to expect. The lighter areas mean hard cork, the darker parts are an indication for soft cork. I start my corkscrew in the middle of the cork and screw it into the same, the full length of the cork. Anything short of the cork's length will lead to the cork's breaking off where the corkscrew's worm stops. I slowly and carefully loosen corks in older wine bottles. I avoid any sudden jerk and slowly apply pressure onto the corkscrew's lever, really slowly. I use much care to extract the cork in one piece,
without spilling any wine. I hand the cork to the guest for inspection. Then I get ready
for the decanting process. Here all I do is I lift the bottle carefully and place
the bottleneck above a light source. I usually use a candle, but a flashlight would
be as good. I start to pour the wine from the bottle into the decanter. The light shining
through the bottle's neck allows me to see what I pour. The whole idea is to transfer as
little of the deposit as possible. Whenever sediments approach the bottle's neck, I slow
down to a light trickle from the bottle. For the whole process of decanting a steady hand and much care are needed. Older wines with sediments cannot be decanted in a hurry. Bottles brought in by customers which have been shaken up while transported, and if the option to let the wine sit until the sediments settle does not exist, these wines get decanted too. It is the same routine like all others but I add a coffee filter, which I place above the carafe. What I actually do is decant the wine into a funnel lined with coffee filter-paper (lately I use a gold plated reusable coffee filter made by Melita). The filter works well in keeping all the unwanted, floating goodies out of the carafe and out of the guest's glass. I use the same coffee-filter-method for Port wines.
Nearly all Port-wine-bottle-necks are made of very dark glass which makes it impossible to
see what is poured through the neck's passage, using a filter solves the guessing problem.
A word about cork. There is a need and a place for cork in wining and dining. It certainly is not appropriate for corks to swim in the guest's glass or far worse to shake hands with the guest's taste buds.
01/03/09 |
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