Overswirling may be socially perilous, but worse is the misguided advice that drinkers should vigorously aerate wine in their mouths. After you sniff your wine, the common directive goes, take the wine into your mouth and suck in air to make the flavors more pronounced. Gargle and chew your wine. Slosh it against the sides of your mouth. Make noises like Hannibal Lecter contemplating liver, fava beans, and a nice Chianti.
Although this motorboating technique can be helpful to accentuate a wine’s flavors by causing its volatile elements to vaporize, it is really only necessary for professionals when they evaluate wine at trade events and competitions. Putting aside its ridiculous, self-important appearance, slurping isn’t recommended because it can often lead to choking and dribbling, thereby imperiling your clothing. Crucially, it doesn’t remove any of the limitations of what is the less sensitive of your two senses. We can taste just five elements—sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory/umami—whereas we can sniff thousands of things, making the nose far more sensitive to the finer nuances of wine.
This should not discourage you from getting a good, evaluative taste of the wine. Take a healthy sip and see if you can evaluate the wine for its weight or body (light, medium, or full?), acidity (low, moderate, or tartly sharp?), and dryness (bone-dry, off-dry, or sweet?), and with red wine, its level of tannin (low, moderate, or gum-dryingly high?). But you had best leave any gargling and burbling to coffee machines and heating pipes.