Definition: Decanting or oxygenation?

The Canard carafe, designed to counteract gravity, allows for effortless and more precise pouring. Misunderstanding persists with this verb, which is often misused. Decanting has never meant "pouring the contents of a bottle into a carafe". According to Larousse, decanting consists of removing impurities from a liquid by allowing them to settle at the bottom of a container. This separation is achieved by carefully transferring the liquid to another container. A carafe is ideal for this, provided that the technique is carried out in a single, slow and continuous operation. Only red wines containing sediment should be decanted.

However, it is inaccurate to refer to decanting when pouring all red wines without sediment, dry white wines or sweet wines, which generally have no sediment, into a carafe. Pouring wine into a carafe from a height allows it to aerate and oxygenate.

As for the advice to open a bottle up to two hours before serving, rest assured that this serves no purpose. The volume of liquid in contact with the air is not sufficient to produce any noticeable result.

Unfortunately, this is still a fairly common practice among restaurant staff responsible for serving wine.

How many times have I heard when ordering wine: "I'll open the red wine now to aerate it and serve the white wine with the starter!

In the entry "Decanting or decanting", we examine everything related to the definition of the word decant. Decanting and decanting are in fact two very distinct operations with different purposes. However, the German language, which has a poorer vocabulary for wine than French, increasingly uses the same word for both operations: dekantieren in German. The word "dekantieren" simply seems more refined than the words "umschütten" or "umfüllen" for "decanting". The most appropriate term would certainly be "karaffieren" for "putting into a carafe", but this seems to me to be a little-used neologism.

From there, it was only a small step for our multilingual team to start using the French term décanter to mean decant. What can you do? Language is alive and sometimes flouts rules and contradictions.

I have attended several tastings where the question of uncorking in advance has been raised, and I remain convinced that it is a good practice for certain wines that are too fragile to be decanted. It should be noted, however, that it is necessary to increase the amount of empty space in the bottle by pouring a little wine into a glass: this is an opportunity to taste it at this stage.

The key, in any case, is to perfectly control the aeration of the wine – neither too much nor too little – so that the wine in your glass has retained all its aromatic components and can reveal its full range of scents on the nose.