If you are lucky enough to have access to a good bottle of older vintage wine, you may be in for a real treat. Experiencing this bottle, however does take some care. Wine is a living organism and the older it is, the more careful one needs to be with it.
Instructions
Serving Vintage Wine
1. Let the bottle rest, upright for at least 24 hours. If you've been storing your good bottles of wine on their side, you're doing the right thing. Storing wine on its side does a couple of things, especially in older bottles of wine. It keeps the cork moist, making the seal on the bottle more secure. It also keeps the seal more airtight, making the wine's contact with outside air that much more difficult. Before serving this older wine, however, it needs to spend at least 24 hours in the upright position. This is because, as a wine ages, sediment begins to gradually fall out of the wine. This will collect on the side of the bottle and pour straight into your glass, unless it has had a chance to reposition itself.
2. Open the bottle--CAREFULLY. This may sound like a simplistic instruction, but the older a bottle of wine gets, the more fragile and brittle the cork becomes. Your experience with opening bottles of wine has, most likely, been entirely with new bottles with firm corks that you can force a corkscrew into with wild abandon. This is not at all how one must approach an older bottle of wine. Take your time. Getting the cork out in one piece will save you the headache of trying to fish out pieces of shredded cork in front of your guests.
3. Decant your wine. If your bottle is relatively old (between ten to twenty years), it is appropriate to decant it before serving. This is literally the act of pouring the entire bottle of wine into a container (usually glass) called a decanter. This is a way to expose the entire bottle of wine to air, in order to let the wine oxidize slightly. This "opens up" the wine, softening some of the tannic quality of the wine (if it is red) that is inherent right out of the bottle. It also allows you to pour the wine off of it's sediment. To do this, light a candle and, as you are pouring the wine VERY SLOWLY into the decanter, have the candle behind the neck of the bottle. This will allow you to clearly see the liquid as it passes. Once you reach the end, and you see the sediment pour into the neck, stop pouring.
4. Strain, if needed. If you get some cork in the wine or if the sediment has not completely settled, do not fret. While decanting, use a tea strainer as an extra precaution. A coffee filter in a plastic funnel works fine as well. It is less elegant, but it will not affect the taste of the wine in any way.
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