Is decanting a red wine necessary to improve the flavor? - Quora

Aromatically and in terms of flavor, the best pinots can exude not only fruit flavors—warm baked cherries, plums, rhubarb, pomegranate, strawberry jam—but also the sense of damp earth and rotting leaves (the French call this sous bois, or forest floor), plus mushrooms, worn leather, and what’s sometimes in Europe called animali—a highly attractive

Ernest ordered calves liver (fegato alla Veneziana), which he said was a restorative, and he ordered a bottle of Valpolicella Superiore, which he told the floor waiter to pour for us without waiting for the bottle to breathe. “Italian reds don’t need oxygen,” he said. “I got that bit of Bacchanalian wisdom from Fitzgerald.”

At first thought, it might seem as though a barrel-fermented white wine would also take on an undesirable amount of tannin from the barrel itself. Curiously, this is not the case. During fermentation the developing wine does extract tannin lodged in the staves. But when fermentation is complete and the spent yeast cells (lees) are removed from the