Breathing
If I make the argument that wine is a living thing, then it is easy to understand the metaphor of letting a wine breathe. To round back on René Descartes, I live therefore I breathe. And something wonderful does happen to wine when it is exposed to the air - at least for a while. It is during this while that we re-discover just how varied and unique the juice is.
There is a very specific set of chemical and molecular reactions that fire off to provide us with the sense of the wine’s development in the glass. But I am no chemist and I care less for the sequence and more for the experience itself. I am glad someone knows why it happens, but that is something of a recent development. Over the centuries wine growers and wine makers were aware of the same process as they encountered the wine they made, but the molecular chain reaction was, for them, an unnamed mystery.
Sort of like our autonomic nervous system. You know, breathing.
As astounding as the depth of scientific inquiry is, I fall squarely in the camp of “Don’t ask why, just enjoy it.” Half a lifetime ago a friend was in her cups, quite upset that some British physicists had discovered a sound-wave’s crest, trough, and crest that they determined originated with the Big Bang. Her words were, “Why can’t they leave it alone? They’re taking way all the mystery.” My answer to her was, “So what? They’ll never be able to say what erupted. It gets too close to God for them.”
Same thing here. No matter how specific the science of wine becomes, it will never be able to explain our pleasure in consuming it. The rustic barnyard aroma that comes sailing off a glass of a simple country French wine, or the heady mix of tar and lavender that can only be found in Nebbiolo, is a specific chemical reaction, but so what? The endless quest for greater specificity is an endless quest for more information and must not be confused with the quest for wisdom. Rarely do facts matter the way truth matters. The truth is that bottle of Minervois is greater than the sum of its parts because we - you and I - complete the wine-maker’s work by consuming the wine. If it stays stoppered it is a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it.
Wines don’t need to breathe. We do. We anthropomorphize wine because it is in a constant state of change, just as we are. It is a type of controlled decay that we hope is the same for us - namely, that we get better with age. Of course, some wines benefit from softening them with air, but that’s because we’re drinking ‘em too soon. What’s the hurry? Put the corkscrew down and step away from the bottle. If you have to let a bottle breathe to make it palatable then you should think twice about opening it.
The only breathing that matters belongs to you and your loved ones.