To Let Wine Breathe Or Not To Breathe

We've all heard that we should let wine breathe... Okay, but for how long? At what temperature? Or, should we let the wine breathe at all? The whole concept of letting wine breathe, or aerate, is simply exposing your wine to the surrounding air. By allowing wine to mix with air, the wine will warm a little and the wine's bouquet will open up, the flavor will soften and mellow out and the overall full flavor characteristics should improve. Allowing a wine to breathe is to oxidize the tannins or molecules in the wine that give it the puckering on your tongue. The best way to know if a wine has to breathe is to taste it. If the pucker is too sucky then you might want to let it breathe a little.

Here are some simple guidelines to help:

An oakey chardonnay generally can be served straight from the bottle. No breathing time is required.
Your lighter, fruitier grapes such as merlot, shiraz/syrah, and pinot noir usually don't need to breathe. They get all the aeration they need just being poured into your glass. If you taste it and it's too tannic, just swirl it around in your wine glass and let it rest a minute or two.

Young wines usually need help, but most vintners these days design their wines to be served young. In our society today, no one wants to wait for anything and that includes letting wine breathe!
The boldest wines, red zinfandels and cabernets, are the most likely to benefit from breathing a few minutes. You can always test it by tasting it to see if it has mellowed enough.

Italian and Spanish wines often need a few minutes in the glass, so do some French burgundies and Bordeaux. They're designed to be tannic; that's the way the Europeans prefer them. We Americans like it softer before drinking. We would need to let it breathe a while.

If a wine does need to breathe, though, just popping the cork isn't going to help. You would need to pour it into a decanter and swirl it around a couple of times. Personally, I never would pour wine into a decanter. I would do it for ambiance or to impress my dinner guests at the table but the wines of today are designed to be easy to drink without waiting, especially the ones in my price range.