What makes a good wine aerator? Part 1. How to remove unpleasant smells.

You have to start with what is a wine aerator.  

A wine aerator is a device that is used to introduce air into a wine, which claims to enhance its flavour, aroma, and overall drinking experience. Aeration is supposed to allow the wine to "open up" and release its full bouquet of flavors and aromas.

So what makes a good wine aerator?

You have to start with the objective of wine aeration.  Why are we aerating wine and what are we trying to achieve by aerating wine.

By aerating wine we are trying to do several things:

1. Remove unpleasant compounds from the wine
2. Boost the wine's flavour
3. Soften the wine's tannins
4. Improve the mouth feel.

Part 1. How does a wine aerator remove unpleasant compounds.

Removing unpleasant compounds from the wine.

The first thing that tends to happen when you open a bottle of wine, particularly an older red wine is the release of alcohol and other chemical elements, notably, sulphur compounds including hydrogen sulfide, which expresses as swampy or rotten-egg type aromas; free sulfur dioxide, which smells like matchsticks and smoke; and some types of mercaptans, which result in the less pleasant notes of canned vegetables, rotting veg, onion, and garlic. The first two, in particular, are the elements that “blow off,” or quickly disappear.

Additionally there are mercaptans which can take quite a time to evaporate and can persist even with prolonged oxygen exposure.  Also known chemically as thiols, mercaptans are organo-sulfur compounds that emit unpleasant, skunk like aromas of rubber, sulfur or garlic.

The so want of this is that with traditional decanting of wine these unpleasant compounds in wine can take several minutes to several hours to evaporate.  

Wine aerators will help with this to a great or lessor degree.  In order to perform better than decanting the wine aerator will need to increase the surface area of the wine exposed to the atmosphere.  Most wine aerators can only increase the surface area of the wine 5-10x that of the surface area of a decanter so while they do help with removing some of the volatiles they don't really do that good a job.

Why is the Winewizard the best wine aerator and why does it work so much better than decanting wine or using a Venturi type wine aerator?

Winewizard's patented wine aerator increases the surface area of the wine 10,000 times greater that the average wine decantor. (Winewizard increases the surface area to the size of a football pitch and back again in around 5 seconds).

Winewizard diffuses millions of microbubbles into the wine, allowing naturally occurring, unpleasant volatile ethanol and sulphur to escape which mask the true aromas and taste.  This process is achieved in seconds.  Other wine aerators just can achieve this level of surface area and so fail to make much difference.