Not buying the OP’s cited premise either. Came in to this thread to comment on SeldomSeen’s “jostling” point. Added air’s certainly going to change what you’re smelling in the glass, whether it’s from added oxygen getting to the wine, or reductive “bottle stink” blowing off the wine, or both. One winemaker I hung around with, lacking a decanter or iced tea pitcher, would put the cork back in the bottle and shake up the bottle. Not recommended with a sediment heavy wine, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend you do that with your 1937 Richebourg, but it certainly seemed to soften and open up his notoriously hard Cabs.
I corresponded with a knowledgeable taster who thought most of the changes in wine as it sat in the glass were due to the wine warming up from cellar temp (or refrigerator temp, as the case may be), more than the effects of any air getting into the liquid. I never did rigorous experiments to prove or disprove his point, but I thought his idea had merit. If anyone has cites to good organoleptic studies of his temperature/wine appreciation theory, I’d love to read them.
There certainly is a lot of unneeded bullshit and snobbery surrounding this hobby. Which is a pity, considering how delightful a glass of wine can be.
What you need to do, of course, is to pour half a glass of wine into one glass and another half into the other glass, and swirl one of them clockwise and the other clockwise. Then hold both glasses to your mouth and drink both at once.
Argh. I just realized that I said clockwise twice. One of them should be counterclockwise. And the one that is swirled counterclockwise should, of course, be on the left.
Bad Tapioca. Bad, bad Tapioca. Now go to your desk and write, 100 times: “I will never dunk anything into a glassful of 1982 Chateau Petrus”. Then say 100 Hail Marys and 50 Ave Marias, and we’ll think about letting you off without flogging.
Whatevs, who cares about what it does in the GLASS when the little magnetic demons hit it, what’s important is how it acts in my tum-tum. I’m up for a “go big” experiment on this thing…someone meet me at the UCSF NMR with a few bottles of Louis Michel. We’ll probably need a “designated technician”, too.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but I’m not saying that anything was correct in that link… as far as I can tell, they’re equally crazy and equally non-scientific. But they are using an idea (that water “clusters”) that might explain what was meant by “wine cell” in the original article.
Just for the record, this at least is true. Water molecules have a negative charge on one side, and 2 positive charges on the other. Positive attracts negative, so water molecules stick together.