From The Wall Street Journal
(April 27, 1998, Section and Page Unknown):
“Breakthrough! Pulmonary Doctor Discovers Key to Wine Breathing”
By Ron Winslow, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
At his day job, Nirmal B. Charan is a pulmonologist in Boise, Idaho, who treats patients with such chronic lung ailments as emphysema. But a recent dinner with a cardiologist colleague from Milan led to an international experiment to investigate breathing problems of a different sort.
When Dr. Charan suggested a bottle of Idaho wine, his guest, Pier Giuseppe Agostoni, who has wine makers in his family, advised him to uncork the wine well before serving it to let it breathe and enhance its flavor. Dr. Charan replied that wine sitting in a bottle can't breathe.
To settle the argument, the two physicians purchased five bottles of inexpensive cabernet sauvignon the next day and took them to Dr. Charan's lab at the VA Medical Center in Boise, where he's chief of pulmonary and critical-care medicine. Piercing the corks of each bottle with a needle, the doctors withdrew small samples of each and measured the oxygen pressure in an instrument known as an arterial blood gas analyzer. The pressure in the corked bottle measured 30 millimeters of mercury, Dr. Charan says. That compares with 90 millimeters in well-oxygenated blood.
The men then opened the bottles and repeated the tests at two-, four-, six- and 24-hour intervals. "It doubled to 61, but it took 24 hours, as opposed to when we just swirled the wine in a glass," Dr. Charan says. For that part of the experiment, the pressure leaped to 150 as the doctors swirled the wine for just two minutes. "We became pretty good at swirling," says Dr. Charan, who is presenting the findings Monday at a meeting of the American Lung Association/American Thoracic Society in Chicago.
Meantime, Dr. Agostoni, with proof that the bottleneck hindered good breathing, carried the experiment one step further. After returning to Milan, he invited 35 wine drinkers to a party to determine whether they could tell the difference between wine that breathed and wine that didn't. Dr. Agostoni first asked his guests to taste wines fully aware of which had been swirled and which hadn't. Only two were so palate-challenged that they couldn't tell the difference.
When the remaining 33 guests were then blinded as to whether their samples had breathed or not, 32 correctly identified the samples that had higher oxygen levels and found swirled wine tasted much better than wine drunk immediately after it was corked and poured. Says Dr. Charan: "Just like blood, oxygenated wine is better than nonoxygenated wine."
Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB893624845856856000