By the time you read this, summer (or at least late spring) will hopefully have arrived in your corner of the northern hemisphere. And every year – along with gardener’s tans, finding your flip flops and wishing that you’d cleaned the barbecue the last time you used it – the warmer weather brings questions about chilling wine.
Friends often ask sheepishly whether it’s acceptable to put ice cubes in their glass of white or rosé. Sure, I reply. If the wine was served too warm, it’s much better to dilute it slightly and drink it at the optimal crisp temperature than to persist with a flabby, unbalanced drink.
KEEP YOUR COOL
No one ever asks about putting the red on ice, though. Because you simply don’t do that, do you? Red wines, as everyone knows, are supposed to be served at room temperature.
But 30°C in the shade is clearly not room temperature, and even though most of our homes are an ambient 18°C-20°C, that’s really not the ‘room temperature’ rooms used to be when the expression was first coined.
The optimal drinking temperature for most medium-to-heavy reds is about 16°C, so your barbecue-friendly bottles of Shiraz, Malbec and the like shouldn’t be sitting in the sun while you are cooking the sausages – they should be in the fridge, cooler or ice bucket. Like whites, reds served too warm lose their definition and become soupy, with the alcohol more noticeable.
A good rule of thumb is to take your white wines out of the fridge (or whatever cooling system you are using) 20 to 30 minutes before serving, and to chill reds down for 20 to 30 minutes before serving.
MADE FOR CHILLING
When it comes to lighter reds, there are plenty of grape varieties that you can
