Our Take on Aeration 101-The Spreathe
When Image of Wine decided to expand its product offering we looked into aerators. We sampled all the aerators we could find in the marketplace. We even ask a glass artist to explore crafting an aerator that would aerate yet be almost a kind of art. All of which is to say, we spent a lot of time and by inference, a lot of money exploring options.
We have decided on importing a new aerator that uses a “dip tube” to uniformly aerate wine within a bottle; all done with the simple press of a button and electronically wine is aerated for 2 minutes. As they say, “look Mom, no hands”. That is the genius of our new aerator that is on the Image of Wine website-www.imageofwine.com. At $39.99 it is money well spent to open the flavor, aromas and bouquet of a bottle of red wine.
To get to this point however we had to spend a lot of time with winemakers, wine lovers doing tastings and with sommeliers from the Court of Master Sommeliers and International Sommelier Guild. The winemaker alluded to here has produced 90+ point wines over the last several years and the sommeliers work in the restaurant business and a national chain of wine retail stores. So, we had a pretty good cross section of people with wine experiences to help evaluate aerator options.
OK, so what is this entire background diatribe about? Well, it points out there are a plethora of wine aerating systems and opinions from wine educated people as to the value of aeration. What we ended up focusing on are the importance of and differences between a wine’s aromas, bouquet and flavor?
Aerating wine, in any form, works on 3 areas involving the wine experience – aromas, bouquet and flavor; you need to have them all working together to get the full experience of any bottle of wine.
Aromas-What you smell in wine, before you taste it, are the aromas. From this experience a person might distinguish the aromas of fruit, herbs, floral scents, and maybe even some earthy notes. Some even can pick out tobacco or specific spices.
Bouquet-Wikipedia defines bouquet as referring to the smells that arise from the chemical reactions of fermentation and the aging process of wine. Bouquet can also come from oak in the fermentation process. The bouquet is generally associated with the notes coming from the aging process of the wine which is brought about by chemical reactions of sugars, yeast, acids, etc.
There are literally hundreds of compounds that are constantly interacting in wine that make up aromas and bouquets. Young wines do not have this process fully matured and aerating definitely helps.
But where do wines’ flavors come from? Simple answer is: from phenolic compounds. But, you must have aromas, then bouquet and finally they help with flavor. Of course you don’t have aromas and bouquet without the underpinnings of flavor.
Flavor-Aroma and bouquet bring us almost to the finish line. How many times have we all said, “I almost enjoy smelling the wine as much as drinking it?” What gets the flavor making process started are such things as: the vines and rootstock that are planted, the varietal and blends of the varietals in the winemaking process, the soil of the terroir, weather, winemakers magic and a lot of help from the Almighty.
Confused? As we all know, wine is a complex creation and that is what makes it interesting. We feel our aerator brings the complexity of red wine to life-can’t be alive without air. It is great for young wines, high tannin wines, full bodied wines and the simplicity of the Image of Wine Spreathe makes it all amazing.