I have never acquired the cultivated palate my family seems to possess. Wine leaves me unmoved, registering only as red, white, or sparkling. My preferred drink is a four-ingredient lassi: yogurt, water, salt, and cumin. If I’m feeling decadent, I’ll crown it with a sprig of mint.
This made me the worst possible companion on a trip to Sonoma, where my family debated notes while swirling, sniffing, and deploying words like unctuous—even claiming to taste hints of “forest floor.”
When I first witnessed double decanting, I assumed it was theater for theater’s sake. The sommelier poured wine from bottle to carafe, then back to the bottle—two gestures where one would do. I watched this and thought: pretense. It must be!
![Stanley with a ‘T’ Likes to Double Decant (The Gentlemen, 2024)]
But something in his deliberation suggested otherwise. This wine represented years of labor and the work of many hands: farmers coaxing vines through seasons of drought and plenty, vintners trusting fermentation’s slow alchemy, designers crafting labels worthy of the contents. Perhaps, I thought, a little ritual was deserved.
The first pour stripped sediment and let the wine breathe. The second pour returned it to the original vessel, label intact, so the table knows what has been chosen and shared. The wine that came back was “opened”, transformed in a way a hurried pour would have denied.
And once I saw it, I began noticing the logic of double decanting everywhere.
In writing, certainly. I rarely send anything the day I finish it. One draft to purge the obvious errors, another to let the true meaning breathe. Time is needed to strip the sediment of unclear thinking.
Cooking works this way too. The chicken noodle soup I made tasted twice as rich the following day. A recipe for tomato sauce recommended a full day of simmering on the stove. Flavors marry in darkness, in the chemistry of waiting.
Brenda Ueland called this slow yet purposeful idleness. With my decanting lense I saw this as creativity requiring two vessels, the mind that generates, and the mind that refines. Even Tolstoy worked this way, she claimed.
Naturally, I became insufferable. “All meaningful work requires two pourings,” I evangalized to anyone who would listen, as though I had invented patience. I was a convert drunk on my own metaphor.
Last week I spent days on a magazine pitch. Researched thoroughly. Edited ruthlessly. Let it decant for days. By the end, I thought it objectively good.
Three hours after hitting send, the rejection arrived. Polite. Professional. Swift. A single pour, you might say.
The editor had not double decanted my submission at all—no patient consideration, no time to breathe. Just a quick taste, then the literary equivalent of expectoration. My carefully crafted argument for the virtues of taking time had been dispatched with indecent haste.
The universe, it seems, has a taste for irony. I am reminded to leave wisdom to the ancients—those who carved their counsel into stone, who understood detachment far better than I. I should try harder to live by the principle I learned years ago, the one that helps me smile at rejection and mark the effort with a small ritual: a mini peach pie from the corner bakery.
Ironically, I celebrated with fruit—the very thing the ancient text warns against seeking. As Arjuna was once told,
You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits. Act for the action’s sake. And do not be attached to inaction.
Action and fruit continued…
Pitiful are those who, acting, are attached to their action’s fruits. The wise man lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone.
From Stephen Mitchell’s fantastic translation of the Bhagavad Gita [Ch. 2 Verse 43-52]
The peach pie tasted suspiciously like reward. But perhaps that’s the point—even our imperfect attempts at wisdom deserve a small, sweet celebration. Do the work. Release the outcome. Buy the pie. Continue. Everything else is sediment to be poured away.