Wine aerators are a dime a dozen and to be honest, most are probably purchased by people who don’t know a whole lot about wine and are convinced an aerator or decanter will magically transform their $8 bottle of 2010 Bogle Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon bottle into an $850 bottle of 2006 Château Lafite Rothschild 1st cru classé, Pauillac. (As I gasp for post-rant air…)

Rest assured, this will never happen. On top of that, not all wine will even benefit from aeration. I’ll get into that a little later. Right now what matters is this, the HOST Adjustable Wine Aerator.

2009 Domaine Bernard Baudry Chinon Les Granges with the HOST Adjustable Wine Aerator

I picked up this wine gadget up from Kenneth Wingard for $39. I chose this particular wine aerator because it claimed a unique feature. According to its claims, you can select the level of aeration by the hour. You can (theoretically) literally dial in how much aeration you’d like to accomplish in a matter of seconds instead of hours.

To understand how this could even be possible, it’s important to understand what wine aeration is, and why you might want to aerate your wine.

When you aerate wine, you are in theory doing two separate things; oxidizing the wine and encouraging evaporation. The following is an over-simplification that will annoy the hell out of my wine expert friends, which is half the reason I wrote it. Continue reading →