If there is one thing that is drilled into wine drinkers in their formative boozing years, it is that white wine is served chilled, and red wine is not.
Your humble narrator has certainly been known to lay a firm talking-to upon the untrained and unsuspecting 18-year old squeaky-voiced banquet server at the community hall hosting the old stag & doe wedding party, and once even unleashed a righteous torrent of wine-related wrath upon a boutique hotel owner for keeping his red wine in an uninsulated cold storage cellar in the middle of our Albertan winter, resulting in entirely frosty red wines.
However, moderation is the key to all things, so there are times that it can be wise to put a bit of a chill on a red wine.
The ancient wisdom, handed down over the centuries, is that red wine should be served at cellar temperature, not room temperature.
Of course, the cellar temperature in question is not the wine rack you have next to the hot water tank and furnace in the basement.
No gentle reader, the cellar temperature referred to by the ancient winemakers would have been a cool underground stone cellar in a great medieval castle, long before the days of central heating. Aim for about 14-18 degrees celsius, which is likely several degrees colder than your basement.
The reason we chill white wine is to reduce the sweetness. However, putting the same chill on a red wine brings out the tannins, making the wine too tart to enjoy.
Each type of wine has an optimal serving temperature that will bring out the flavours and aromas that the winemaker worked so hard to achieve all the way from grapes to glass, so we owe it to those hard-working artisans to drink their wine the way it was intended.
The sweetest of the sweet wines, like Canadian Ice Wines, can be served almost ice-cold, although most are served at 6-8ºC. Note that this is still warmer than your refrigerator, so pull that bottle out of the fridge about 15 minutes before you intend to serve it.
Light and medium bodied white wines like Chardonnay or Sauv Blanc release the best flavours and aromas when served at 9-10ºC, which is noticeably warmer than your refrigerator. Either invest in a wine fridge with specific temperature set points, or just pull the bottle out the fridge 20 minutes before serving.
Moving on to the lightest of the reds, we find wines such as Beaujolais Noveau express themselves best around 12ºC, which is quite cool for a red wine. Luckily, the lighter red wines have very little tannin, so the chill does not make them too tart.
Medium bodied red wines like Chianti or Pinot Noir tend to exhibit the best flavours when served at 14-16ºC. If you do not have a dedicated wine fridge, the easiest way to attain the optimal temperature of this wine is to drop it in an ice bucket for five minutes or so before serving. This will drop the wine just a few degrees its storage temperature, letting the best of the aromas and mouth feel shine through.
The so-called Big Reds, the Bordeaux blends, Shiraz, Merlot, and the like, have the fullest flavours, and therefore the most tannins. These wines are best served around 18ºC, to avoid tasting overly tart if they are chilled any further.
The full-bodied red wines tend to be the most popular in the Canadian market, which is fortunate, as they taste the best when served at the common room temperatures of today, which hover around 24ºC. It is still best if you store this wines in the coolest room of the house, as they will taste better a few degrees cooler than room temperature.
With the scorching hot days of August behind us, your intrepid liquor reporter recalls more than one occasion that a bottle of Merlot was opened on a moon-drenched patio, with the ambient temperature still in the high 20s, and I felt no shame in keeping that bottle cool by dunking it in a fancy silver ice bucket for 5 minutes out of every 20.
Yes, gentle reader, ice buckets in the summer are not just for your bottles of Corona! Try one at your next patio party to keep your wine at its optimal temperature.
