Looking for some advice and info

[Zinner]

A lot of the wines you're drinking may not need to be decanted or left to breathe. If you're happy with the way they taste, sip away. Perhaps the point is that if a wine doesn't instantly appeal to your palate, then you might give it some time to open up and see what you think. Different flavors may develop over a period of time.

An example might help. A friend and I were tasting wines at a shop in Berkeley. She liked all the wines except one and she said to me that she saw no possibilities at all for that wine. My friend is a partner in a Napa winery and knows wine and food. I agreed that it was tough and tannic. But I said that a whisper of fruit and spice on the finish(flavor left in the mouth after you swallow the wine)made me think the wine could improve.

Fortunately the shop folks knew I was headed up to Sonoma to taste with a couple of winemakers and insisted that I take along a few bottles including the tannic monster. In the two or three hours it took to get around to tasting again, both of the winemakers and I agreed the wine was rather good. Still tannic, but yeilding to some lovely dark fruit.

Some was left over and the next day I had it again with some curry chicken for lunch. By this time, the wine was just stunning with loads of dark berry rounded out with flavors of spice, espresso and cola. Stood up to the curry and then some. All it took was some time. The wine was a red from the Languedoc region in France(likely syrah, grenache, perhaps mourvedre, the grapes) and sold for around $12-14 at the time.

When you open a bottle of wine, it will evolve over time. This can be good(it can develop flavors) or it can be bad(it can lose flavors). It's not always predictable and even experts can misjudge. That's one of the fascinating things about wine--that it is sort of like a kaleidoscope in a glass and will show you different sides of its character if you give it a chance.