Decades. maybe centuries of received expert wine wisdom tells us that red wines should be served at around 60º Fahrenheit, whites around 50º. But most of keep our reds in houses where "room temperature" is more like 70º and chill our whites in refrigerators that are down near 40º, and those ten-degree gaps can have a major impact on what ends up in our glasses.
Blind Muscat thought he had this figured out, between the selection of cooler places for storing reds and taking whites out of the fridge a bit before drinking, and so on. Then he started using a thermometer, and discovered he was fooling himself big time--and you may be, too.
The vague notions of "room temperature" and :cellar temperature" that float around wine discussions trace back, ultimately, to the preferences and pronouncements of the wine snobs of late 19th century England, an opinionated lot whose housing arrangements, however grand, conspicuously lacked central heating. Combine that with year round fog, and wine storage likely located somewhere under ground level, and you get an ambient temperature somewhere between the mid-fifties and maybe 60º. Incredibly, this puts both whites and reds in the ballpark for serving temperature, and also fit the standard recommendation for optimum long-term storage temperature.
But, we no longer live that way, and let's raise a glass to that. Chances are that even for serious wine drinkers, the places where bottles reside, even in a single house, have different characteristics--the basement, the dining room, the refrigerator, the refrigerator door that's actually a couple degrees warmer since it’s open a lot, the fancy wine storage cooler, the kitchen counter when the bottle is freshly back from the store. And the ambient temperature in many of those places can easily vary ten to fifteen degrees, even with the application of central heating and air conditioning. IN other words, the only way to know what temperature your wine is at is to measure it.
The other part of the equation is calibrating your own personal taste. You may or may not have the same sensory preferences as those old Brits; you may like your reds warmer, or even cooler, or like Big Reds warmer than light, fruity ones, or like your whites good and bracingly cold, or crave the aromatics they get when they’re warmed up. Your call--but one way or another, it probably makes a difference.
Hence, any wine fan is well advised to spend a little time testing and sipping and trying things out. In pursuit of which project, let me recommend the Menu Wine Thermometer, distributed by the Creative Danes, Inc. It's a digital read thermometer on a flexible plastic cuff; skip it around a bottle, press it to activate a tiny switch on the back, and it gives the temperature in a few seconds. According to the booklet that comes with it, the wine should be one degree cooler than the bottle reading. To use the thermo-cuff in a very different temperature environment--like putting it onto a bottle in the fridge--the gizmo needs half an hour to adjust, so that the temperature of the housing doesn't throw off the thermometer reading--just wait a while, then press for the temp. Since the built-in battery isn't replaceable, you'll have to toss this little appliance after two hours worth of readings--time enough to get a much better grip on what temperature you like your wines at and what you may need to do in your personal spaces to get them there.
I have discovered over the last week that 1) I really do prefer my wines close to the traditional target temperatures, especially making sure red temps come down well under the 70º they will trend toward, and I've gotten more serious about a routine of putting them in the fridge for half an hour before serving. Ditto the whites, which need time outside refrigeration to warm up (more, of course, will happen in the glass)--except for sweet, late harvest dessert wines, or which I drink a lot which I prefer well-chilled. I'm still experimenting; I think I want my pink wines cold, too, and my Zinfandel warmer than my Beaujolais.
Cost is somewhere around $38--about the cost of ruining a perfectly good Oregon Pinot Noir by serving it at 78 because it's been sitting on your sideboard awaiting dinner guests during a heat wave.
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