Should You Use A Blender To Aerate Wine?

The question of how to serve wine properly is one that haunts every would-be at-home sommelier. Whether you're trying to make the best of an inexpensive wine or bring out the complexity and depth of a pricier one, there are plenty of ways to really open up a bottle. One method that's slightly less common is using a blender. Food Republic asked Mathew Woodburn-Simmonds — home coffee expert, former sommelier, and founder of Decoding Wine — whether this trick really works.

"[While] a blender will definitely aerate the wine, it's really a question of what you're hoping to gain by doing this," Woodburn-Simmonds said. "If you've just opened a $20 bottle of red, and you feel like it needs to open up and breathe, then you can decant it, and this will immediately add air and help."

Be careful, though — there might be a cost. Picking the right bottle of wine is crucial, as different wines respond differently to aeration — some hardy red wines, for example, can even survive being left out overnight. But if a wine is particularly old, you could run the risk of ruining it completely.  "[Y]ou could destroy the wine if it's at all delicate, and definitely if it has a decent amount of bottle age," he stated. 

Ultimately, "it's not going to magically make bad wine good and it could make good wine bad... [T]he best-case scenario is it makes mediocre wine slightly better faster." So though it might be okay as an absolute last resort, aerating with a blender isn't really a good idea.

If you do decide to try this technique, Mathew Woodburn-Simmonds noted "the best advice would be to choose a wine you drink all the time that you think gets better as it opens up. Try using a blender when you open it and experiment to see how long it takes to get to its 'peak.' Then you can know every time you open a bottle exactly what to do."

When it comes to figuring out how to actually blend your wine, Woodburn-Simmonds recommends keeping things simple. "Put the blender on high speed for no longer than 30 seconds. That's really all there is to it, which is why people like the idea." It's true that being able to instantly improve your wine with little to no effort is a wonderful idea, but you might need to use a little trial and error to find out what method of blending works for each individual wine. "There's no one-size-fits-all solution to decanting wine, so maybe starting with a 10-second burst and testing the result is best practice." 

Really though, to properly aerate your wine, there are plenty of methods that preserve its quality, and don't really take that long! If you're planning on drinking a whole bottle, then letting it sit in a decanter for ten minutes will do the same job, but protect all those intricacies in the wine. For just a glass, pour away, and leave it for 20 minutes.