Wines in the Glass

I think people underestimate how quickly most wines change in the glass. I was reminded of this listening to Giulia Negri explain to Stanley Tucci on CNN’s Searching for Italy series that one  of the particular beauties of Barolo is that it changes in the glass with great rapidity - and indeed with each sip the wine seems to emphasize something different.

There is of course the issue of what happens to the wine before it even gets into the glass - while it rests in the decanter. This is not the place to discuss the various approaches to decanting. Suffice to say that the whole concept of exposing wine to air to improve it prior to drinking it supposes that the wine changes with time after the cork is pulled. There are dozens of points of view regarding the merits and process of decanting. I know some who assert the wine gets less pleasant in the decanter before it gets better -  but at that later point it its more enjoyable than if you had poured it immediately from the bottle. What seems certain is that if a wine changes so much in the decanter it surely must continue to do so when subsequently in the glass. It doesn’t just stop changing. Proponents of not decanting at all take this position usually because they want the wine to change only while it is in the glass, not from the belief that wines don’t change at all. Rather the opposite.

So everybody accepts wines change in the glass. A glass returned to after being set aside a while bring choruses of “My, how that has changed”. I don’t recall anyone ever saying “Oh, this hasn’t changed at all”. But my point is how little time it takes for noticeable changes to occur.

That a wine changes so quickly when in the glass may not be everyone’s preference. At a single point during this progression one may find the wine at its most appealing and one would prefer if that moment was not fleeting. But one of wine’s beauties is that it is alive and so, that it not taste precisely the same in the glass over even ten minutes is to be appreciated as the expression of the wine’s vibrancy.  Since there is no other option - unless one drinks the wine extremely quickly when one thinks it to be at its very best - we may as well get behind this idea that it is part of wines’ wonder that it is never precisely the same from one minute to the next.

Without really any basis to support the assertion, I would expect that some grape varieties have a propensity to change in the glass more than others.   

This is the reason I try not to write a tasting note until I have finished the glass. And in that note I try to emphasize how the wine changed over the course of the time I took to drink it. If not, a note is just a single frame in time - not just in the long journey of the wine over many years in the bottle, but also at a particular point in time while the wine was in the glass.