A Reserve Syrah? Let's Pour It In The Blender and Give It A Whirl
Last week, I wrote a post about being in the audience for the world premiere of the mother of all cookbooks, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Sciene of Cooking, which comes out next week. While this publishing sensation been getting a whole lot of attention, much of the focus seems to be on the molecular gastronomy portion of this 50-pound tome, but there's so much more in the five volumes.
One of the many entertaining points made during the course of the evening was about the rather shocking idea of pouring wine in a blender to aerate it. "I did this with some very old wine from a Spanish duke," author Nathan Myhrvold explained. "He actually preferred it in a blind tasting, but was unconvinced, so we did it again and won him over."
The idea is to infuse air into wine, opening it up, softening its tannins. Power aerators have become really popular the past few years, offering wine fans the chance to take the practice of decanting to the next level. A blender really takes it up a notch, though. But does it really work better than decanting? Or is it more of a parlor trick?
The other night, I had friends over for dinner and decided to give it a whirl. Now, I didn't use an older wine from the cellar because, well, frankly, my cellar is pretty bare after a couple of cross country moves and downsizing of my storage space.
Still, a buddy brought a Reserve Syrah from New Zealand and said she was wide open to testing a blender's possible ability to change the wine's character for the better. We held back one glass as the "control" in our little experiment. The rest went into my Oster and I hit the switch.
It foamed up like crazy. It looked like the cap you see on wine when it's fermenting. There was definitely a lot of air forced into this deep red liquid. Everybody got a kick out of it.
Did it taste radically different than the wine that had just been poured into the glass? Not really. After about 15 minutes, when it had a chance to rest in the glass, then this tasted much rounder, maybe a little spicier, but still not sure it wouldn't have softened up in the glass anyway. Guess this might require a bit more "research."
-- Leslie Kelly
Beacher on March 06, 2011 at 03:18 AM
Did it taste radically different than the wine that had just been poured into the glass?
bbb on August 01, 2011 at 12:17 AM
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