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"Let&amp;#8217;s say you went to someone&amp;#8217;s house for dinner and presented a young, big red wine&amp;#8212;say, a Michele Chiarlo Barolo Cerequio 2003 ($90)&amp;#8212;as a gift. The host looks it over and promptly pours it into a decanter, leaving it there for an hour before serving. Clearly the host is:a)&amp;#160;&amp;#160; &amp;#160;a pretentious poseur and snobb)&amp;#160;&amp;#160; &amp;#160;a worrywartc)&amp;#160;&amp;#160; &amp;#160;uninformedd)&amp;#160;&amp;#160; &amp;#160;from Parise)&amp;#160;&amp;#160; &amp;#160;quite savvy about the ways of wineWell, I don&amp;#8217;t know your friend. He might be a snobby Parisian worrywart, but he&amp;#8217;s definitely e), too. Decanting is perhaps the cheapest and easiest way to be a wine sophisticate in a world where the bottles themselves are getting more expensive all the time.Decanting should be done in two cases: When you&amp;#8217;re dealing with an older red and you suspect there&amp;#8217;s some sediment in the bottle that you&amp;#8217;d rather not have in your glass, and when you have a young, tannic red that needs to breathe.Let&amp;#8217;s take these scenarios one by one. Decanting is, predictably, great for getting rid of the weird chunky stuff wine can produce: tannins and pigments that simply separate over time and settle at the bottom of the bottle. It&amp;#8217;s no big deal, but you also don&amp;#8217;t want to be drinking that stuff. (Trust me on this; I&amp;#8217;ve done it. It&amp;#8217;s like unexpectedly swallowing a cardboard flan.) This probably isn&amp;#8217;t an issue for reds less than a decade old, but it varies with wine types, so if you want to check, just hold your bottle up to a light (a candle or flashlight underneath usually does the trick, but sometimes it&amp;#8217;s hard to tell with dark bottle colors).What a lot of folks don&amp;#8217;t know is that sediment is only part of the picture. Decanting feisty, under-five-year-old reds like those from the Northern Rhone region of France is a great idea because these wines tend to be ungenerous at that age&amp;#8212;meaning the flavors haven&amp;#8217;t had a chance to open up yet. In truth, oxygen helps release the aroma and taste of most red wines, regardless of age. (We keep it in a bottle in the first place so that this doesn&amp;#8217;t happen until we&amp;#8217;re ready.) Letting your red hang out in a decanter for 30 or 60 minutes will make it more expressive. It &amp;#8220;breathes,&amp;#8221; or becomes less tight and simply provides more of what it&amp;#8217;s got. I wish I had decanted a bottle of Ladera Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon Howell Mountain 2004 ($85) the other day. I served it hastily, and though I could tell it was plush, balanced, and full of fruit, I could also tell that it wasn&amp;#8217;t giving me the full picture just yet. After a half-hour in the glass, the black cherry notes, for instance, became sweeter, fuller, and rounder.As a bonus, &amp;#8220;opening up&amp;#8221; a wine also gives you a sense of how it will age. Decanting a bottle is like fast-forwarding its development, since oxidation essentially equals aging. Serena Sutcliffe, the worldwide head of Sotheby&amp;#8217;s wine department, told me she loves to leave a little bit of red in her glass overnight. When she wakes up, she gives it a taste, getting a quick picture of what the wine will be like many years down the road.So is decanting ever a bad idea? Rarely. If you have very old, very delicate wines, decanting them for too long can dry them out and hasten them to an early grave. It&amp;#8217;s depressing when this happens, but it&amp;#8217;s a pretty unusual scenario indeed for most wine drinkers&amp;#8212;if you are drinking a lot of grand cru Burgundies from the 1960s, for instance, you don&amp;#8217;t need to be reading this column anyway. With reds, my rule is to decant it and see what happens. It generally can&amp;#8217;t hurt, and it will probably help. In two weeks, in the second part of this column on decanting, I&amp;#8217;ll talk about how to do it properly, and in what.Ted Loos, executive editor of Art+Auction magazine, is the former features editor of Wine Spectator and has written on wine for Bon App&amp;#233;tit, Town &amp;#38; Country, and many other publications. He&amp;#39;s the author of Town &amp;#38; Country Wine Companion: A Tasting Guide and Journal (Hearst Books; $12.95), published in fall 2007.  In the Cellar  appears on ARTINFO every other Wednesday. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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