How long should wine breathe?

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This helpful tip comes from Columbia Winery’s own wine educator, Steve Vernon: Open a bottle of red wine and let it breathe for $1 a minute before drinking. What does that mean exactly? A decent $15 bottle of wine should breathe for 15 minutes. A more expensive $60 bottle of wine should breathe for an hour.

Vernon also notes that decanting is a double-edged sword–decanting speeds up the time needed to let a bottle of red wine breathe … but the subtle bouquet escapes with the decanting.

More tips coming soon. Cheers!

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About Margot

Margot has been writing about wine since 1997 at KOIN-TV in Portland, Oregon; ten years later, she created this blog. Write for Wine focuses on the fine wines of Washington state, with additional posts about Oregon, B.C., California, ANZ, France, Italy, Spain and more. A former national journalist in Canada and the U.S., Margot has been a Washington wine enthusiast since moving to Seattle in 1999. Her motto: “It’s wine o’clock somewhere.”