To breathe or not to breathe?

How does wine breathe?

It doesn't. "Breathing" is a shorthand term to describe the complicated changes that take place in wine once it's exposed to the air outside the bottle. Wine geeks use the term aeration rather than breathing, and they know that just opening a bottle is deeply inefficient. The surface area exposed is tiny - and the air can get to it only through the small opening of the bottle neck. That kind of "breathing" takes hours if not days.

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