(Photo above courtesy of Dr. Myhrvold’s book, Modernist Cuisine — read our previous post: Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking by Nathan Myhrvold)
While the average oenophile decants a bottle of red wine using a glass carafe, Nathan Myhrvold decants using a blender.
The very idea of pouring an expensive bottle of vino into a hostile machine where steel blades whip the wine up into a frothy frenzy may seem brutal and sacrilegious to devoted oenophiles, but the blender method comes from a culinary mad scientist whose encyclopedic series, Modernist Cuisine, pursues culinary perfection through painstaking, sophisticated science.
Myhrvold calls the method “hyperdecanting” in a recent guest article he wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek, and said it’s particularly effective for improving the flavors of younger wines.
“I just pour the wine in, frappé away at the highest power setting for 30 to 60 seconds, and then allow the froth to subside (which happens quickly) before serving,” he wrote last week.
Knowing, perhaps, that his highly unconventional method may raise a few eyebrows, Myhrvold challenges readers to conduct their own blindfolded taste test, decanting half a bottle the old-fashioned, non motor-powered way, and the other half in a blender, as per his instructions.
Meanwhile, wine can also be decanted sans decanter. Wine aerators are small devices which mimic the same effects of a decanter by injecting as much air and oxygen into the liquid so that the wine opens up and ‘breathes.’