I’m posting this blog two days before “Cyber Monday,” and unless you’ve spent the past two days since “Black Friday” hiding under the covers to avoid the commercial barrage, you’re already all-too-aware that holiday shopping season is well underway.
Wine lover that you are, you’ve probably got friends who share your interest in vino. However, that’s no assurance that they also share your taste, so buying wine for them may not be the best idea. Better to buy something that will help them enhance their enjoyment of the wines they prefer, and I’ve got just the thing.
No…it isn’t a Coravin. Granted, that amazing device is probably the Wine Gadget of the Century, in terms of sheer innovative genius (it permits one to check a wine for maturity without oxidizing it, using a surgical-quality needle and a system for replacing the liquid with inert argon gas). However, though I purchased a Coravin a few years back, and though I’m very glad to own it, I’m a bit too much of a populist to advise others to buy it. After all, a gizmo that costs up to $300 to let one sneak a peek at a wine just doesn’t make sense for those outside of the wine trade–or those who already have so much wine and money that they don’t need my advice.
So, my recommendation goes to a device that costs one-tenth as much as a Coravin. It is the “Aermate,” specifically the bottle-sized model, which is the most effective wine aerator that I’ve ever used.
As you may know, the world is now rife with wine aerators. They became very popular a few years back, and proliferated like rabbits in heat. For a while, I actually collected some of the most ridiculous devices that showed up on my doorstep, but as they started to stack up, the 
amusement value declined proportionately, and I chucked the lot of them. (With the single exception of a glass with an internal aerator, which I thought was so delightfully stupid that I had to keep it, just for fun.)
For years, my aerating system has consisted of a thick, old milk bottle and a cheapo stainless steel funnel. With virtually every bottle of red wine that I open to drink (as opposed to evaluate and score), I simply poured the wine vigorously into the milk bottle, and then funneled it back into its original bottle. The fancy term for this is “double decanting,” and it is quick, effective, and used by famous winemakers around the world. Never having found a device that worked any better, I was done.
Until the Aermate showed up. It is basically a stainless steel wand with a squeeze bulb at the top and a tip that has lots and lots of teeny weeny holes. I still use my old system, but once I’ve poured the wine into the milk bottle, I insert the wand and give the bulb 7 or 8 good squeezes, which forces a gazillion extremely small bubbles into the wine. Once the resulting 
foam has subsided, I funnel the vino back into the bottle (not because additional aerating is necessary, but simply to avoid confusion, since I’ve always got multiple bottles open at once).
The device is very effective, and those with a lot of technical knowledge about wine will know the specific name of the effect as “micro-oxygenation.” Those without a lot of technical knowledge will nevertheless find the effect to be significantly more pronounced than with other aerators, for the simple reason that a lot more oxygen is introduced to the wine because of the greater surface area of those gazillion little bubbles.
One little hitch: The packaging for the device touts its ability to extend down to the bottom of a wine bottle, which indeed it will. However, if you employ it in this manner without first removing 
a good glassful of wine, the foaming result of even a squeeze or two of the bulb will produce a massive, frothy overflow. I confess that I made this mistake on my first use of the Aermate, and my only defense (for doing something that seems quite dopey in retrospect) is that I’d become so dismissive of aerators that I now test all of them in a perfunctory way, since most of them are a waste of money.
This one anything but a waste of money. When first introduced four years ago, it went from $40 on release down to $30 pretty quickly, and now is offered on several wine supply websites at $20. However, Amazon is now selling it as an "add on" item for $5.99, as long as you add it onto an order of $25 or more. Or, you can do what I did just before posting this blog, which was to buy SIX of them to get that price. You can guess what the wine drinkers on my shopping list will be getting in their stockings this year. This thing is terrific, and will make almost any young red more expressive in terms of aroma and flavor.
I give it my highest recommendation. Very much to my own surprise….
1