Serving temperature

Temperature changes perception substantially. Cold suppresses aroma and accentuates acidity and tannin; warmth releases aroma but makes alcohol obtrusive and the wine flabby.

Rough guide: sparkling 7–10°C, crisp whites 8–11°C, rich whites 10–13°C, light reds 13–15°C, medium reds 15–17°C, full reds 16–18°C.

These are ranges, not targets. A degree or two either way changes very little.

Wine warms in the glass by a couple of degrees within fifteen minutes, so serving at the cooler end of a range is usually the safer choice.

From a 20°C room, roughly two to three hours in the fridge gets a white cold; twenty minutes in a bucket of ice and water does the same job far faster than ice alone, because water conducts heat much better than air.

Temperature changes what a wine tastes like more than any other thing a drinker controls, and it is the one variable most consistently got wrong at home. Warmth increases the volatility of aroma compounds, so a wine smells more as it warms — and it also increases the perception of alcohol, so past a point the extra aroma arrives with a burn.

Cold does the opposite. It suppresses aroma, sharpens the perception of acidity and tannin, and mutes sweetness. That is why a cheap sweet white improves in the fridge and an expensive Burgundy does not.

The practical failure modes are the same in every household: white wine served straight from a cold fridge at 4–5 °C, where it has almost no smell, and red wine served at modern room temperature of 20–22 °C, where the alcohol dominates and the fruit flattens. "Room temperature" as a convention dates from unheated houses and meant something closer to 16 °C.

A useful correction is to take white wine out of the fridge twenty minutes before pouring and put red wine in for twenty minutes before. Both moves are in the right direction for almost every bottle.

A wine also warms in the glass — around 2 °C in ten minutes in a warm room — so pouring slightly cooler than the target is right rather than fussy.