Are You Serving Your Wine Too Cold?
Many times in my wine courses, someone will ask whats the correct temperature to serve wine? The genuine answer is whatever temperature you like. The actual answer is like all things in wine, it’s purely subjective. But lets have a look at some guidelines below that may help you to get started.
Occasionally in a wine class, somebody will feel that I am serving wine that is too warm. I dig a touch deeper and find that they are used to drinking their wine directly from the chiller. The difficulty with that is that most fridges are set to about 40 degrees.
That is superb for beer or sodas, but way to cold for wine. If a wine is too cold, it loses the majority of its flavour. Literally the flavour molecules slow down and you lose the aromas that are so vital to wine tasting. If it is too hot, it is not refreshing.
The ideal temperature for whites is about 55 degrees. At 55, it’s still cool enough to be refreshing and feel chilled, but warm enough for the scents and eventually the taste to be at their maximum. OK, if this is the correct temperature, the proper way to I get my wine to 55?
The perfect solution is to get a home wine refrigerator. They are customarily available anywhere where electronics are sold. Units vary in price but in some cases can be as low as $100. A sound investment for when you become a regular wine drinker.
Another solution to serving wine at the right temperature is to take your wine out of the key refrigerator and set it on the counter for about a half hour. The temperature will rise about 3-4 degrees each 10 minutes. The drawback is that it’s incredible hard to have a look at the bottle that long without drinking it.
It’s kind of like going thru the drive through, ordering fries and seeing them on the passenger seat and telling yourself that you’re going to wait until you get home till you eat them. It’s just not humanly possible.
If you find that your wine is too cold, say in a bistro, use body heat to your advantage. Cup your hands around the bowl of the glass for two minutes and you ought to be OK.
Champagne on the other hand is an exception the white wine temperature range. It is designed to be server a bit less warm than “still” wine. I myself like my sparkling wines to be about 45 degrees. Another reason for this is the less warm the bottle, (to a point) the lesser the carbon dioxide expands which really make the bottle less complicated and safer to open.
I believe the perfect temperature for red is about 64 or 65 degrees. Blasphemy you are saying! What, I thought reds were supposed to be a room temperature. Well, perhaps. It really depends on what you standard of room temperature is. If you think back about a hundred years when wine was controlled by the French, the standard fashion leader was some form of royal who lived in a huge castle with 2 foot thick stone walls.
Think of the times you have walked through buildings like that. They are actually cold. Room temperature 2 hundred years back and before central heating was likely in the low to mid 60′s. Not the 72 most people think of today. So thru the years, folk recalled the room temperature part, but forgot that room temperature is different from era to era.
So the result’s that today, we drink our reds at our room temperature, not in the low to mid sixties. About 10-15 minutes in the fridge or about 5-10 in the fridge should do the job
If you like your wine at 72, by all possible means drink it at 72. But I might also inspire you to try your wine with a slight chill and see which 1 you like best. Remember, drink what you like and how you love it. The wine serving temperature is down to you.
Mark is a pro winemaker, previous winery owner, author and frequent speaker on wine. He currently helps folks learn about wine by teaching wine classes throughout the US.
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