Give it air - but not too much

John Borrell

The Warsaw Business Journal wine school meets on Saturday, October 26, 12:30 pm at the Boathouse Restaurant. Cost is zł.95 per person, including buffet

Drinking roughly half-a-bottle of wine a day is probably good for your health. But then, so too is consuming a similar amount of non-vintage grape juice from a cardboard box and, come to think of it, I don't know anyone whose interest in wine is purely medicinal.

My own half-a-bottle-a-day habit means, of course, that every other day there's a half empty bottle of wine sitting on the sideboard. This 24-hour sojourn is not a bad thing, as I learned a long time ago. It allows the wine to "breathe" or "open up", which is winespeak for the process through which contact with air helps make wine smoother, softer and, generally more agreeable to the quaffer.

This is why expensive wines are generally served from a decanter, into which the wine has been carefully poured - keeping back the sediment is also one of the aims - an hour or two before serving. The shape of the decanter increases the surface area of the wine in contact with the air and thus speeds the integration process.

But you can achieve much the same effect in the bottle by opening it and pouring out the wine in the neck. This significantly increases the area of contact between wine and air and the bottle should then be left to stand for six to 12 hours before drinking. When leaving half a bottle until the next day, it is best to re-cork it.

Roughly 24 hours exposure to air is about the maximum wine will take before it ceases to be just soft and agreeable and starts becoming at first flabby, and then disagreeably oxidized - which means that it smells and tastes a bit like dirty socks.

Prove all this to yourself by choosing two bottles of the same red wine, then opening one six to 12 hours before drinking and the other minutes before you pour it into a glass. You'll be so impressed that you may even want to rush out to buy a decanter.

The basic function of the cork, or any other stopper, on bottles of wine is to keep the wine in and the air out until someone wants to drink it. It's as simple as that, and within a decade, more than half the world's wine will be sold in bottles with screwtops and artificial stoppers.

Unfortunately, most people consider screwtops and artificial stoppers inferior to cork and there is an assumption that if a bottle doesn't have a traditional cork, it is inferior or cheaper.

Neither is true. Even very good and very expensive wines are beginning to be bottled with screwcaps, rather than corks, wine makers from the New World are leading the way - as they so often do when it comes to innovation.