Wine Temperature

Look at a bottle of wine. Not just any wine, but look at the back labels or obverse labels if you prefer. You'll probably need to look at a few before you find this, but sooner or later, you are going to find one that has a suggested serving temperature. How do they know?

They experiment. People with presumarbly more expertise on the subject than you or I have might actually take the time to taste a wine at different temperatures. They are looking for that small range of temperatures at which the wine expresses itself best. And, when they find it, that becomes the recommended temperature.

That's pretty simple, huh? It would be simple except that most of us don't have a way of controlling such things. I happen to have a cooling/warming device that gets wine to within a degree or two of a specificed temperature. It wasn't expensive, but I haven't seen one for a while. Alternatively, even if you don't have any means of temperature controlled wine storage, you can buy a really cheap thermomemer to see how long a wine needs to be in your refrigerator to get from room temperature, whatever that is in your abode, to some ideal temperature for that type of wine.

Suppose you just don't know at what temperature tyou should serve your wine. Here is a handy-dandy rule of thumb. Serve your white wine warmer than you normally do and your red wine cooler than you normally do. Actually, this might not be the anwwer in the rest of the world, but in the US, it certainly is. Americans as a group, sadly, drink their wines at temperatures far too extreme.

You don't believe me? Try an experiment. Get a bottle of cheap, but not ridiculously cheap white wine. Chardonnay should work well, but it's not a requirement. Open the bottle. Pour yourself an ounce or two at room temperature and mark the glass. Put the bottle in the freezer. After 5 minutes, pour yourself another ounce or two. Do the same at the 10, 15, and 20 minute marks. Now, taste all 5 glasses. Do they not taste different from each other? 

Which one os the most expressive? That is, which one gives you the strongest sense of flavor as compared to just freezing your palate or tasting like swill? I't sunlikely to be the room temperature wine or the 20 minute wine. But, this should tell you something.

What temperatures do we want? Well, it varies. Generally speaking, for red wines, start with big, bold, tannic red wines with moderate to low acidity at perhaps16-17C/61-63F and as the wine gets less tannic and less acidic, bring the temperature down. For Pinot Noir, you might be around 15C/59F and for Beaujolais (Gamay), bring it down to about 13C/55F. Those are my ranges; yours might be different, but I think this is a good starting point.

For the whites, the same rules apply. But, since white wines, almost without exception, do not have tannins, we need to focus differently. More body, less cool. More acidity, more cool. So, Chardonnay, in my opinion, should be served at 10-11C/50-52F (not the typical 4C/39F that many restaurants seem to think is proper while Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling, as examples, might be well served at about 6C/43F.

Remember, though, it's your palate that you are trying to please, not mine.

I can't leave this topic just yet, though. The worst offenders of these principles are the people with more money than sense who grace our TV screens and Instagram feeds. It's not unusual to see a Hollywood star pictured drinking a bottle of wine that I can only dream of. I'm told by someone who was a server in a trendy restaurant in what is now called WeHo (West Hollywood), apparently, that some of the younger celebrities just come in and order a bottle of the most expensive wine on the list without even looking at the list. Because they can.

And, then they drink the wine the same way they do on TV. They grip the glass that has been carefully poured from a bottle that had been properly cellared right around the bowl being sure to get all the heat from their sweaty palm on to the glass and warming the wine. Just like you would with brandy. They don't care and this makes me sad. The winemakers have spent hundreds of hours painstakingly crafting great wines so that these entitled individuals can waste them doing everything they can to ruin the flavors.

Don't be like them. Please.