Vin-Aire Experiment

So I'm trying an experiment tonight, using my Vin-Aire. Herself got it for me in O'Briens last year and since then it has proved its worth on numerous occasions. It allegedly aerates the wine as it passes through, acting as the equivalent of decanting a wine, I guess.

We have blind tested it a couple of times and and each time everyone preferred the Vin-Aire'd wine to the wine that came straight out of the bottle. I keep a couple of cheap IKEA vases/jugs on hand such that I normally give any wine we drink a couple of hours to "mellow" before.

Anyhoo, for a variety of reasons we are going to drink a wine tonight that I really didn't like before. It's a Domaine Horgelus Cotes de Gascogne 2011.  My notes on the last bottle consisted of three words, "Awful - down sink".

I decided that I would attempt to mitigate my dislike by going ugly early, in a perhaps vain effort to make the wine (more) drinkable.

At approx 4pm I did the following:

• Opened the wine.
• Poured wine into cheap IKEA decanter.
• Poured wine back into bottle via Vin-Aire.
• Poured wine back into decanter to oxidise some more.

It's now 7pm and I'm going to taste it again. I realise I should have tasted it at 4pm for comparison purposes but that's by the by. So here goes...

On the nose it's - OK. In the mouth it's not great. Not straight down the sink bad, but a little cheap and fizzy on the tongue, and not much going on elsewhere. If it wasn't for the current experiment I'd probably give up and open the second of two bottles of Domaine L'Ostal Cazes Estibals Minervois 2008, which I got in the O'Briens French wine sale last week.

Wine of the weekend was Domaine de Villemajou Corbieres by Gerard Bertrand 2008, also from O'Briens which was reduced from approx €19 to approx €15. Both June and I bought it indpendently and it was a cracker, a single vineyard stunner, and a steal as priced.

Back to the cheap stuff, I will taste again about 9pm for a final verdict, join me then.

**Update  - So myself and Herself finished this off and it was  - alright. By 11pm it had lost most of
its sharpness and had become perfectly drinkable, if nothing more.

I don't think this was because of the Vin-Aire, but probably the seven hours it had been open and decanting*. I may return and do some more experiments with the Vin-Aire at a future date.


* I know technically I am aerating the wine rather than decanting it (removing the sediment) but I'm not going to change my terminology at this late stage, and also I'll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah!