Red Wine Tip: Aerate Inexpensive Red Wine in a Blender

When you open a bottle of red wine, it often needs a little time to open up and breathe. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, but what if you simply don't have that long? Perhaps you forget to open it and then find the wine is too tight, or you have a guest drop by and want to pour out the wine right away? Well, an unexpected kitchen tool can help you out.

First, why aerate your wine in the first place? It's certainly not right for every wine, but the thought behind it in certain cases is to expose your red wine to as much surface oxygen as possible so the tannins and compounds that lead to a rough-tasting wine are slowly broken down. This especially goes for inexpensive wines that are perhaps lacking a little finesse, or are too young. Vigorously aerating a rougher, less expensive big red wine can make for a much smoother, more enjoyable sip.

The folks at Cook's Illustrated Magazine came up with the idea of aerating wine using a blender. It may be a little too gauche for true wine aficionados, but it does the trick. They note that while it's "seemingly harsh," many restaurants practice the trick and that it results in wine that tastes more developed than undecanted wines.

If the blender is simply too odd for you, the testers found that pouring the wine from one carafe or container to another at least fifteen times had a fantastic result with bright, balanced, and complex flavors.

So you take your pick: if you have time to plan for folks coming over, then cracking open a bottle and using a decanter if you have one is a great idea. But when you need a glass right away, the kitchen whiz that's usually in charge of morning smoothies and pureeing soups may just come to the rescue.

Comments (14)

I was intrigued when I read this in CI but am unlikely to do this on my own. I know it sounds silly but pulling out the blender to whip up a bottle of wine is just too much trouble for me.

So after all the winemakers and pundits spend all this time talking about how you need to treat wine gently if its going to be good, you're going to put it in a blender? Really?

Strikes me that people don't have a clue what decanting is supposed to achieve. For example, one of the wines pictured here - Evodia Grenache from Spain. Its a very soft young wine, there's no reason to decant or aerate it. If you've opened a Barolo or good Napa cab thats far too young, well - its going to be tannic and there's still an argument to be made as to whether or not decanting is really a good idea.

I can't imagine doing this with a blender either...mostly because my appliance storage is in an outside room (tiny kitchen). I could, however, see "decanting" it into a mason jar or other wideish mouthed container (a classy pitcher?) and using my immersion blender which DOES live in the kitchen. I wonder how whisking would impact it as well...

I just imagine having some friends over, opening a bottle for dinner and saying "Excuse me" stepping into the kitchen then VRRRRRR!!!!!!! and walking back with whipped up glasses of Franzia! Class to the max!

I just was gifted a Vituri aerator for Christmas I look forward to playing with in a month when I have my baby and can drink again! But aside from something like that, I'll give it time to breathe or just pour back and forth if need be. Blender seems a bit too aggressive. It's wine, not margaritas.

yet another reason why an immersion blender beats a stand blender any day.

Who pops a bottle that needs extensive aeration for a drop by guest?

Beyond that, this is just silly.

Because nothing says "classy" like pureeing your wine first. ;)

Ok, Apartment Therapy it is time to hire/find a wine person to work for The Kitchn.

About a year ago you had a suggestion that people freeze leftover wine for cooking. For the record, please don't do that. There are so many other better options. Boxed wine for cooking comes to mind because the bag limits air exposure. You can also pour leftover wine into a smaller bottle really anything that you can recap (so a nice clean beer bottle or a smaller ginger beer bottle if you have less wine). You can get a capping device and caps pretty cheap. Filled up, the rebottling option gives you bit of time before you need to worry about wine becoming oxidized beyond its utility in the kitchen.

And now this?? Blending?? No, no, no! Decanting is often unnecessary. Wine needs a few things to be happy the right temperature, no sunlight, and please don't physically abuse it. (Sounds a little like a Gremlin, no? Don't feed it after midnight...) If you fell you have a bottle that needs decanting by all means decant it. Open a less closed wine to start the night! Your friends will never be sad to have MORE wine. If they are, find new friends.

But PLEASE put your hands at your sides and step away from the blender...

my favorite tip learned at a Napa winery was if the wine tastes a little harsh, swirl the living daylights out of it in your glass for 30 seconds. you may look a little amateurish to some for swirling so vigorously and for so long, but it really does the trick! and no blender necessary, thanks.

This is a joke, right? I'm a wine professional, and I can tell you right now, every single person in my circle of wine friends that I talked to about this today had a good laugh with me. Frankly, this is the most absurd thing I've ever seen written about aerating wine.

I love how all the wine experts/professionals/aficionados are freaking out in the comments... yet none of them seem to be able to offer any actual REASON as to why this is absurd/ridiculous/unthinkable.

I'm not saying I know better. I'd just appreciate some explanation (and perhaps science!) from the experts and professionals as to exactly why blending wine is not a good way of aerating it.

@violent peas: blending wine is a silly suggestion for a few reasons, number one being that anyone serving a wine that could possibly require such a violent aeration (due most likely to extreme age) is pretty likely to have either the time or the tools (like a wide-bottomed decanter, or a Selection/Soiree pourer) to do it properly. Prolonged aeration is not a common thing with modern wines; the average wine served by the average wine drinker is unlikely to require more than a good pour and a good swirl in your glass to open it up.

Other than that, the reasons not to put your wine in a blender range from not wanting to stir sediment back into the wine (this would be a particular problem if we're talking about an older vintage), to possible contamination of the wine with whatever you last wizzed through your Hamilton Beach (particularly if it was something strong or oily -- garlic-tinged Cabernet anyone?), to being forced to serve glasses of wine with a nice frothy head on top.

Perhaps the so called "wine experts" would like to try something with actual recordable results such as a blind tasting before denouncing the suggestion as absurd, lest they all sound like religious zealots to the rest of us. Perhaps they should look into the science of why decanting improves some wines instead of reasoning in their heads "that's how it's always been done".

For example one reason this could be of use to the general public, lots of *cheap* wines have a detectable taste of sulphites, vigorous aeration would cause more evaporation of sulphites than simple decanting (and thus leaving a wine with a more pleasing finish).

The same would be true of the other volatile molecules that evaporate during the decanting process, the more vigorous the aeration the more of them will evaporate (as for whether having more/less of those in a given wine makes it better is up to interpretation, this would be where blind tasting would be of use).

Of course on the other hand is the added oxygen to the wine, but perhaps the fact you'd be drinking it immediately instead of leaving it in a decanter for some time would mitigate the potential oxidation problems.

However all in all, the only way anyone can say whether this absurd or not is to try it blind for themselves, maybe it will suit some wines, maybe it won't suit others.

@SaraHeartburn
I would like to think most people that would attempt this are at least sensible enough to know that; vigorously stirring up something with sediment would be bad, using a blender likely to contaminate the wine would be bad, and that they would wait a few minutes for the froth to dissipate before serving.