Wine Lessons: What Is The Correct Serving Temperature For Wine? (Part 1/2)

LESSON #3: What Is The Correct Temperature For Wine? (Part 1/2)

Is serving red wine at room temperature just a cute way of asking what’s the right temperature for wine to get drunk?

IS DRINKING a glass of fine Champagne at 15°C room temperature really insane? That depends whether you know what you’re doing and more importantly why you are doing it. We’ll get to that later. First, let’s cover some less controversial grounds about wine serving temperatures.

Everybody knows that “serving red wine at room temperature” is a grossly generalized answer to a complex question of “at what is the right temperature for wine to be drunk?”

Complex, yes but difficult to understand, it certainly is not once. All we need to do is to look into how temperature can alter the effect of wine have on our palates.

The temperature-sensitive aspects of wine include alcohol, tannin, acidity and body. Here is a table showing their how temperature’s effect on wine-palate interactions:

TEMPERATURE EFFECT WINE APPRECIATION

Taste	********** Serving Temperature **********
Aspects	Higher	Lower
Tannin	Round, supple	Bitter, harsh
Acidity	Volatile, tart	Milder, flat
Alcohol	Less pronounced	more prominent, hot
Body	Lighter	Full or heavy
Aromas	More intense but dissipates quicker	Subdued but persistent
Flavors	Exaggerated	Less intense

Admitted it is slightly oversimplified but this table handles 90% of the situation that the average wine connoisseur will encounter most of the time. I don’t know about you but for me, memorizing anything more is a lost cause.

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Source: What Is The Correct Serving Temperature For Wine?

Wine Lessons: What Is The Correct Serving Temperature For Wine? (Part 2/2)

LESSON #3: What Is The Correct Temperature For Wine?

FINE TUNING SERVING TEMPERATURE

None of that information will help us much if we don’t know anything about the wine that we’re about to serve. That’s why a sommelier is paid what he/she is paid – usually quite a tidy sum, I’m afraid. When faced with an unfamiliar bottle at home or in a restaurant, remember to taste it first, at the benchmark temperature of 15°C or red, 12°C for white and 5°C for Sparkling. Far too many restaurants make the far too common error of asking them to “taste” a wine at an inappropriate temperature. After that you can decide to adjust the drinking temperature up or down a little depending on the results of the tasting. Let me explain with a couple of examples.

For example, if a red wine imparts too much bitter astringency on your palate, you could warm it up by 2-4°C to make it taste “sweeter”. If you find a white wine (or a very old red wine) to taste far too tart for your palate, you can chill it down a bit more to “calm” the acidity but once the fruit flavors start to disappear, you know it’s too cold. If you have tried very hard to smell a wine and nothing is coming back, you might warm it up a little increase its vapor.

If you don’t have a sommelier following you around all the time to answer your questions about the characteristics of the wines you choose, here are some standard serving temperatures for popular wine styles.

Wine/Style of Wine	Serving Temperature
Champagne esp. Vintage Champagne	5°C
New-world Sparkling, Cava, Prosecco, Sekt	7°C
Lean Whites – Chablis, Chenin Blanc, White Bordeaux, Riesling	9-10°C
Fino Sherry	8°C
Medium Whites and older than 10 yrs – Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, Cold climate Chardonnay	10°C
Full Whites – Condrieu, Hermitage Blanc, Corton-Charlemagne, Warmer climate whites	12°°C
Coteaux du Layon, Monbazillac, ice wine other med-body sweet dessert wine	7°C
Sauternes, Trockenbeernauslese and rich sweet wines	9°C
Beaujolais Nouveau	10°C
Rosé, Beaujolais Village, light-bodied reds	11°C
Light-bodied and older reds; Beaujolais Cru	12°C
Beaujolais Cru, Dolcetto	13°C
Burgundy Village and older crus	13°C
Young Cote de Nuits and crus	15°C
Burgundy Grand Crus and new-world Pinot Noir	16°C
Gran Reserva and Reserva Rioja	14°C
Medium-bodied and 10-yrd-old reds; Barolo	12 -14°C
Amontillado sherry	14°C
Ordinary Tawny Port	14°C
Full-bodied reds	15°C
Very young reds	17°C
Chianti, Brunello	15°C
Young (5 years) Rioja, new-world reds	16°C
Cognac, Armagnac, Brandy	19°C
LBV and 10-yr-old Tawny	16-18°C
Vintage Port	18-20°C
Zinfandel, Amarone, Red above 15% ABV	17-19°C

Serving temperature is like make-up in a way: it can make a beautiful wine very ordinary and it can cover up a lot of flaws for not-so-perfect wines. When done properly, it simply brings the best out of a good bottle of wine without changing its personality.

Now back to drinking Champagne 10°C warmer than recommended, it is not insanity but slightly masochistic perhaps unless you are doing this to taste the wine behind the bubbles. There is “wine” beneath all the fizz and at the near-freezing temperature that we tend to enjoy our bubblies, the qualities of the white behind that goes into making Champagne are somewhat masked. Once we warm it up to 13 or 15°C, the “wine” starts to emerge. However, Champagne is one of the most “acidic” wines. Low serving temperature is necessary to make it enjoyable. We save a little Champagne to drink warm only to check the quality of its base wine. There’ll be more on this subject when we devote one entire lesson on Sparkling wine next week.

Source: What Is The Correct Serving Temperature For Wine?

Wine Lessons: How To Preserve Leftover Wine

This guide is being reprinted with permission from Yats Wine Cellars: The Best Wine-Shopping In Asia

LESSON #1: How To Preserve Leftover Wine

We can’t rejuvenate wines, at best we can stop or slow down its deterioration once the bottle is uncorked.

YOU open a few wine bottles during a dinner party for friends and there is a lot of left-over wine. It is a terrible waste to pour good wine down the drain. Can these half-finished bottles be saved for enjoyment the next day?

The answer is certainly YES.

Let’s understand the problem first before we discuss a solution.

The problem can be expressed in one word – oxidation. Oxygen in the air causes the wine to deteriorate. All we need to do to preserve a semi-finished bottle of wine is to eliminate or to reduce oxygen contact with the wine.

Here is an easy and inexpensive way to achieve this.

Transfer the wine from the bottle into a smaller container such as a small plastic mineral-water bottle, so that the wine fills up the entire bottle leaving very little room inside for air. This immediately reduces the air-to-wine ratio inside the container.

To achieve even better results, we must reduce the negative impact of air contact with wine by reducing oxygen’s oxidizing power. This is done very simply by lowering the temperature of the container, as low as possible without freezing the wine. At very low temperature, oxidation hardly occurs.

We can’t rejuvenate wines. At best we can stop or slow down its deterioration once the bottle is uncorked. So if you notice half way through dinner that some of the wines will not be finished, start the preservation process earlier so the wine is fresher to begin with when it enters the smaller container.

Sparkling wines can be resealed with a Champagne stopper and kept reasonably lively overnight if stored in cold temperature. Its pressure of the fizz inside the bottle prevents external air from entering. Furthermore, Champagne is very high in acidity which helps to preserve it against oxidation also.

For very serious – read expensive – wines especially older and more fragile bottles, you might have to invest lightly on a pump-and-stopper apparatus. It will set you back by a few bucks but your leftover can be enjoyed for 2-3 days.

Of course, why would you take that long to drink it? That’s beside the point. This gadget allows us to create a vacuum inside the bottle by pump air out of it. Don’t apply it to Champagne of course. You don’t want to pump the bubbles away.

NEXT LESSON: Simple ways to differentiate a good from an ordinary wine

Source: How To Preserve Leftover Wine

Wine Lessons: How To Preserve Leftover Wine

This guide is being reprinted with permission from Yats Wine Cellars: The Best Wine-Shopping In Asia

LESSON #1: How To Preserve Leftover Wine

We can’t rejuvenate wines, at best we can stop or slow down its deterioration once the bottle is uncorked.

YOU open a few wine bottles during a dinner party for friends and there is a lot of left-over wine. It is a terrible waste to pour good wine down the drain. Can these half-finished bottles be saved for enjoyment the next day?

The answer is certainly YES.

Let’s understand the problem first before we discuss a solution.

The problem can be expressed in one word – oxidation. Oxygen in the air causes the wine to deteriorate. All we need to do to preserve a semi-finished bottle of wine is to eliminate or to reduce oxygen contact with the wine.

Here is an easy and inexpensive way to achieve this.

Transfer the wine from the bottle into a smaller container such as a small plastic mineral-water bottle, so that the wine fills up the entire bottle leaving very little room inside for air. This immediately reduces the air-to-wine ratio inside the container.

To achieve even better results, we must reduce the negative impact of air contact with wine by reducing oxygen’s oxidizing power. This is done very simply by lowering the temperature of the container, as low as possible without freezing the wine. At very low temperature, oxidation hardly occurs.

We can’t rejuvenate wines. At best we can stop or slow down its deterioration once the bottle is uncorked. So if you notice half way through dinner that some of the wines will not be finished, start the preservation process earlier so the wine is fresher to begin with when it enters the smaller container.

Sparkling wines can be resealed with a Champagne stopper and kept reasonably lively overnight if stored in cold temperature. Its pressure of the fizz inside the bottle prevents external air from entering. Furthermore, Champagne is very high in acidity which helps to preserve it against oxidation also.

For very serious – read expensive – wines especially older and more fragile bottles, you might have to invest lightly on a pump-and-stopper apparatus. It will set you back by a few bucks but your leftover can be enjoyed for 2-3 days.

Of course, why would you take that long to drink it? That’s beside the point. This gadget allows us to create a vacuum inside the bottle by pump air out of it. Don’t apply it to Champagne of course. You don’t want to pump the bubbles away.

NEXT LESSON: Simple ways to differentiate a good from an ordinary wine

Source: How To Preserve Leftover Wine