Serving
Serving wine
Of everything you can do to a bottle after buying it, temperature makes by far the biggest difference — and it is the one thing most people get wrong in both directions at once.
Put your red wine in the fridge for twenty minutes. “Room temperature” was coined in houses at about 16°C. A modern living room is 20–22°C, which flattens fruit and pushes alcohol forward in almost every red.
Take your white wine out of the fridge twenty minutes before you pour it. A fridge runs at about 4°C. Straight from there, a good white shows almost nothing.
The four decisions
Matters most
Temperature
A range for every style, derived from its taste profile, with a way to hit it without a thermometer.
Matters sometimes
Decanting
Two different jobs that get confused constantly: removing sediment, and letting a wine breathe. Different answers.
Matters a little
Glassware
Bowl size and rim shape do something measurable. The grape-specific ranges sold on that basis go well beyond it.
Practical
How long to chill
An estimate for any bottle, any method, with the arithmetic shown and the freezer risk stated plainly.
Guides
Guide
Serving temperature
The easiest improvement most people can make to how their wine tastes.
Guide
Decanting
Two different jobs that get confused — separating sediment, and letting air in.
Guide
Decanting versus aerating — they are not the same thing
Decanting does two different jobs, and most advice conflates them. One is about sediment, the other about air, and they call for opposite handling.
Guide
How to chill a bottle quickly
Ice and water beats ice alone by a wide margin, and beats the freezer on safety. Why, and what not to do.
Guide
Red wine served too warm
The commonest serving mistake in Britain, and the easiest to fix. "Room temperature" was defined in unheated rooms.
Guide
Dealing with sediment
What the deposit in an old bottle is, why it is a good sign rather than a bad one, and how to leave it behind.
Guide
Glassware
Where glass shape demonstrably matters, and where it is mostly marketing.
Guide
Opening an older bottle
Old corks crumble, old wine is fragile, and the window can be twenty minutes. What to do differently.
Guide
Opening bottles
Corkscrews, stuck corks, and opening sparkling wine without hurting anyone.
Guide
What order to serve wines in
Light before heavy, dry before sweet, young before old — the conventional order, what it is actually for, and when to ignore it.
Guide
White wine served too cold
The opposite and less discussed mistake. Fridge-cold wine is not tasting of anything, which for a good bottle is a waste.
Guide
Handling sparkling wine
Keeping the bubbles where they belong, before and after opening.
Things that are commonly asserted and rarely true
- “Let it breathe by pulling the cork.” The surface area exposed in the neck of a bottle is about the size of a coin. Nothing measurable happens. If you want aeration, pour it into something.
- “Old wine always needs hours of air.” Frequently the opposite. A fragile old wine can lose what it has within twenty minutes.
- “A good bottle needs a special glass.” One good universal glass, filled a third full, outperforms a cabinet of shapes used badly.
- “Sparkling wine belongs in a flute.” A flute preserves the bead and hides the aroma. Most of the trade moved to tulips for exactly that reason.