Although the powerful and dysfunctional Roy family from Succession, the great HBO series, doesn't usually spend much time eating, let alone cooking, we must admit that we have learned something thanks to Connor Roy. It occurs in the second season when what looks like juice is served from the blender, but is actually wine. What seems like another occurrence from the less savvy of the brothers, is actually a technique that exists in the world of wine. It's called hyperdecantation and we wanted to ask several sommeliers if it's as crazy as it seems at first glance.
"You manage to age wine for 5 years in 10 seconds," says the older Roy with satisfaction, pouring himself a glass of wine before his sister's astonished gaze. It is not for less, we are talking about emptying a bottle of wine into the blender and stirring it at maximum power for a few seconds.
It sounds like another absurd whim of this character, but the truth is that the writers did an excellent job because, indeed, hyperdecantation is a real technique. "I have never done it, I had heard of it and I know that it is a method to over-oxygenate and take the decantation to an extreme limit, to change the wine in a more drastic and radical way," says Rodrigo Briseño, the restaurant's head sommelier. Enjoy.
'Modernist cuisine' and El Bulli
After the initial shock and verifying that Succession was not a bluff, the second surprise is discovering that this hyperdecantation thing is a relatively recent invention, the idea of none other than Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine.
The highly expensive and coveted work in several volumes on modern cooking from a scientific perspective -on view in every self-respecting restaurant- includes in its fourth book this technique which is baptized as "hyperdecanting".
This is how Ferran Centelles, head of wine at elBullifoundation, explains it, who prefers to talk about hyperoxidation and cites that book to highlight what is undoubtedly the funniest part of this technique. “Perhaps the best thing about hyperoxidation is seeing the shock reaction of many old fashioned experts when they see a wine being shaken in front of them, for that alone it is worth it”, wrote Myhrvold.
It is well known that decanting wine before serving it improves its flavor, explained the author of Modernist Cuisine in an interview published by Bloomberg in 2011. "But the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to achieve it," he pointed out. So instead he proposed passing the wine through an American blender at maximum power for between 30 and 60 seconds, letting the foam that forms disappear and serving.
“The first time I practiced this technique was in 2010, a customer at El Bulli insisted that I put his white wine through the blender. I did, but I remember that the perception of the wine did not change too much”, explains Centelles, who has been a sommelier at this restaurant for a decade.
young wines
Therefore, we are talking about something with a certain oenological logic but unknown even among many wine experts and that is rarely used, especially in restaurant dining rooms.
“Technically it would be like an extreme decantation. During decantation, the wine spreads its aromas rapidly, in some way like evaporation”, sums up Ferran Centelles, who also warns that the aromas of a wine are not infinite and that this hyperoxidation can cause excessive aromatic loss.
Decanting, points out Rodrigo Briseño from Disfrutar, is a very common practice and is used for many different reasons, from cooling a white wine more quickly, to oxygenating a wine to help it open up, or to define its aroma.
Also, in the case of red wines with certain years, to serve them perfectly from the first glass, although it is true that some prefer to notice the evolution in the glass as time goes by with the bottle open. The world of decanting is therefore complex and open to different opinions and techniques.
And although we will not see a blender in the room, there are devices to practice this more radical settling. “There are some conical-shaped decanters with relief that make the wine travel faster, enter a vortex and come out with more force and power, thus adding a lot of air,” explains Briseño.
Radical and perfect to scare the most purists, the million dollar question is whether this technique is really useful. In Modernist Cuisine they say that it is, and in the aforementioned interview Myhrvold defended the benefits of hyperdecantation for all wines.
Ferran Centelles is somewhat less optimistic, and pays attention to the small print of the experiment to point out that, in reality, "the best and only option I see is for young red wines, which have a great aromatic load and have less risk of being empty." of aromas”.
Does anyone dare to do the experiment? The Disfrutar sommelier does not hide his skepticism, but assures that "we will have to try it." Another warning from Centelles for those who are already plugging in the blender: be careful with the whites raised on the lees because "the protein and amino acids of these yeasts foam very easily." And it is that the wine smoothies have not become fashionable. For now.
