Was out with some friends for dinner Friday night, and we opened a number of wines and generally had a good time. But the evening reminded me, for the zillionth time, how important a wine’s serving temperature is.
For the most part, when it comes to how Americans serve up their wines, there only two temperatures that count: 39 degrees (normal refrigerator temperature) and 70 degrees (normal room temperature). These two temperatures have one thing in common—wine should seldom if ever be served at either one.
Our dinner particularly highlighted the room temperature problem. The reds that we had were all around 70 degrees, and maybe even a tad higher. At that temperature, the alcohol stands out, making for a “hot” taste, and diffuse flavors.
(The purists among you may want to skip to the next paragraph now.) The only solution was to dump an ice cube into the glass. I don’t know exactly how much this cooled the wine, but my guess is it got the wine to around 65 degrees. What a difference it made. The wines were now far more balanced, the flavors far more focused. The down side was a slight loss of concentration, as the water from the ice cube diluted the wine slightly. A small price to pay for the marked improvement.

We didn’t have any whites at our dinner, but most whites are served straight out of the fridge. For a thinner style, high acid wine (e.g., Pinot Grigio), that can be just fine. But for most whites that are a step or two above simple quaffing, 39 degrees masks much of the wine’s flavor profile. If you’re paying big bucks for the complex flavors that that wine is supposed to deliver, you’re shortchanging yourself by drinking it too cold.
This is a two-edged sword, however. While that slightly higher serving temperature does bring out the flavors of a wine, for some wines, that’s not necessarily a good thing. If you’re drinking a cheap wine, you’re often happier chilling it down more to mask some of the unpleasant flavors those wines often possess.
In all this, the lowly refrigerator plays the pivotal role. Obviously, it’s responsible for the overly cold temperature of the white that you’ve kept there. But it’s the salvation for the red you’ve been keeping at room temperature.
On my next post, I’ll list my simple rules for serving wine at the right temperatures, with the aid of nothing more than your fridge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 8:41 am and is filed under Wine Tasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.