Ok, you are with three friends and you decide to share a bottle of wine. You pour wine into four glasses and finish off the bottle. After twenty minutes, the glasses are empty. The wine was ok – but nothing to shout about. You make a mental note to not buy that particular bottle again. The problem is – that bottle of wine takes 45 minutes to “open up” properly! Drinking it before it is ready muted the aroma, hid several of the flavors and made it taste a little lifeless. How often has that happened to you? It is really hard to tell, because we simply figure that the wine in the bottle was lacking, not that is was not properly aerated.

The Aermate (lists for $34.99) is a simple and easy to use device to add oxygen to a bottle or glass of wine, as you can imagine. It has a silicone bulb (looks a little like a turkey baster) that acts as a pump, a stainless steel tube that will reach the bottom of a wine bottle and a fairly high tech Microbubble tip that releases tiny bubbles of air into the wine. The materials used in the Aermate seem to be of high quality and there is virtually nothing that can break. It is simple to use and easy to clean. Aerating a full bottle takes less than 10 seconds! Stick the device into the bottle, and gently squeeze the bulb 6 to 8 times (I had a little difficulty with the gently part, so I had red wine splash out of the bottle – you may want a wrap a towel around the bottle opening until you get the hang of things) and that is it. Pull the Aermate out of the bottle and pour yourself a glass. To clean it, just run it under water. It is so easy and effective, there is no reason not to use it on every bottle of wine you open. Decanters look great and work well, but they are a pain to keep clean and they do not aerate the wine as quickly as the Aermate.

The Aermate brings Box wine into play, I know folks who think that the wine companies produce a special brand of bad wine specifically to fill the bladders of the wine boxes. It is actually the same wine you find in wine bottles, it is just the bladder inside the box is designed to keep oxygen from the wine – that is why it lasts 3 weeks after you open the spigot. Every glass that you pour from the box comes out “tight,” they do not use tannic or acidic wines to minimize the problem, but 1 or 2 gentle pulls of the Aermate bulb will give you a fully realized glass of Box wine.

I tested the Aermate on a Portuguese Red that was supposed to be heavy on the tannins with strong oak influence that could use a full hour to open up, while I was a bit too enthusiastic with the silicone pump, I ended  up with a balanced, fresh, bright complex red that was at its peak. I was impressed.

Click here to find the Aermate