In some restaurants, the staff doesn’t want to take the risk of having a customer drink a corked or flawed wine, so they do the tasting themselves. In this situation, expect the wine waiter to show you the bottle before it’s opened, and then take it away after you okay it. Then, at a station specifically set up for tasting wines, where there’s a spittoon for the sommelier so he doesn’t get a buzz on over the course of an evening, the sommelier will open and taste your wine. If it’s bad, he’ll get another bottle. If it’s sound, he’ll bring it back and pour it around. Seldom do sommeliers of this caliber call a wine wrong, but if you happen to get a bottle that has a major flaw he missed (it happens to the best of us), do bring it up.

Decanting

Why do some people get to drink their wine out of beautiful glass decanters while the rest of us get it poured straight out of the bottle?

Most wine doesn’t need decanting; pouring it straight from the bottle is fine. Some wines, however, have a thick layer of gritty sediment at the bottom of the bottle that you’d rather not end up in your glass.

Some people, too, think that some wines benefit from extra air contact, and pouring them into a wide-bodied container will do just that. (So will shaking a glass up and down vigorously with your hand cupped over the top, but that’s a little messy and doesn’t look so good.)

Which Wines?

Wines that typically benefit from decanting are those that have been bound up in their glass bottles for the longest. These wines are likely to have “thrown some sediment”— that is, to have a layer of tannins, pigments, and other compounds that have fallen out of the solution to the bottom of the bottle. Decanting helps keep the sediment out of your glass.

Old wines can also develop “reduced,” vegetal aromas, or seem to have very little aroma at all, after they’ve been hidden away from oxygen for so many decades. Putting an old wine in a decanter lets it “breathe” a bit, or literally sit in the presence of oxygen, so that its aromas and flavors slowly unfold. In a wine with very mature flavors, though, the amount of oxygen it comes in contact with while going into the decanter can blur the line between old wine and vinegar.