Between the Christmas celebrations and the New Years revelry, most of us end up with a bottle or two of inexpensive plonk lying around the house after the festivities are over.
Provided the plonk in question is a young red wine, there is a clever way of turning a mediocre bottle into a tasty accompaniment to the first dinner of 2016... and all you need to try it is a blender.
According to the pros at
Cook Illustrated Magazine, "merely uncorking a bottle and letting it sit for a bit is insufficient. In order to truly aerate wine, as much of its surface area as possible must be exposed to oxygen."
The connoisseurs recommend whizzing the wine in a blender for 30 seconds. Even better results were tasted when the wine was decanted from one jug to another 15 times, with tasters reporting more developed and brighter flavours and less prominent tannins.
Neat, eh? Better pop a cork and test the theory; just make sure you keep a drop of the un-aerated wine to compare it to.
