Why Wine Needs to Be Aerated and Why You Need a Wine Aerator
If you’re a wine drinker and you don’t have a wine aerator, it’s time to change that. An inexpensive wine aerator changes the tasting experience by doing one simple thing, adding oxygen to your beverage.
How a Wine Aerator Works
Wine aerators directly expose your glass of wine to oxygen, which adds to the taste and fragrance. Wine aerators force the wine to interact with oxygen by sending the liquid through a pressurized funnel. The aeration creates a quick chemical reaction that also speeds up the evaporation of ethanol and sulfites. The oxygenation and evaporation remove the unwanted flavors and cleans up the wanted ones.
With so many bottles of wine having unique ingredients like berries and cloves, an aerator will enhance the subtle notes and flavors. By oxygenating your wine, the flavors become more noticeable, which makes the wine-drinking experience more enjoyable.
Some wines need the extra aeration, otherwise, they can taste too acidic or tannic. Aerators can also soften the flavor and make a tannic wine more palatable.
Wines that are heavily concentrated often need time to mellow, and a wine aerator can help with that process. Because wine drinkers prefer to drink their wine, rather than let it sit for several years, using an aerator enhances the rich notes more speedily.
What Wines Get Better With Aeration?
A wine that is immediately bottled often needs aeration, unlike those that are barrel aged. You will also want to aerate red wines because the tannins can disrupt the actual flavor. You do not need to aerate white wines, because they do not have tannins. Instead of aerating a white wine, you simply swirl your glass to bring out the sweet flavors.
You should also aerate heavier wines like cabernet and Bordeaux blends. The aerator softens the robust, overwhelming tannins and flavors, giving the bold wines a gentler taste. Along with the big wines, lower-quality wines taste better when aerated.
No matter what type of wine you have, you can experiment with the aerator to see how it affects the flavors. If you like what the aerator does with a small glass of wine, then use it with the whole bottle. However, some experts recommend keeping aeration to a minimum, as some wines flatten and lose their balance. You can also experiment with your aerator while drinking wine with paired meals. The flavors in your aerated wine might just make your meal taste better, and vice versa.
Aerators at Wine-n-Gear
At Wine-n-Gear, we offer several styles and shapes of wine aerators. We offer custom printing on all of the models. You can add slightly more air with the Diamond Aerator that has a larger diamond-shaped opening at the pouring spout. Our Tube Aerator and Elegant Aerator have traditional styling elegant pouring spouts. The Steel Aerator uses a helix design to add air to your wine, and our Reserve Aerator lets you aerate an entire glass of wine quickly and efficiently.
