So, I watch some cooking shows on PBS and America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country are two of them and the subject of breathing wine came up and they set their people to staging tests, took the readings, had some pro tasters and this is what they found.
Opening the bottle to let it breathe for an hour had negligible effect and using several different aerators was barely any better and decanting was better but still not there for the tasters and they were using wines that the tasters were familiar with and that seemed to be the tell in all of this experimentation. Then they decided to take the decanting to another level and took two large pitchers and poured the bottle in one and then began to pour is back and forth from pitcher to pitcher, tasting and testing after each one and finally settled on 12 pours was the sweet spot and going past that point did nothing but stopping at 10 didn't get them where they wanted to be.
So, I decided to try this experiment at home because I grew up watching Mr. Wizard, a known lush. I do not have a refined palate but I am able to tell the difference in big reds and I did the test at one hour on the bottle breathing, my aerator and then did the pour test and checked it at 3, 6, 9 and 12 and couldn't actually tell any difference after 6 but the difference between the bottle, aerator and the pitchers was remarkable. I do every red this way and do the test with the bottle breathe and pitchers and the pitchers always win by a large margin and I find I can actually pick out some of the nuances mentioned in the description of the wine.
I took this a step further with a bottle of chardonnay that was too heavy on the oak and butter for me and it worked on that as well, really tamed it. I don't breath whites and but I will if it's too heavy.
